4 ms·

My gut says this is related to forced updates and unwanted interface changes in current Microsoft products. It's been super annoying where I work, and staff are

My gut says this is related to forced updates and unwanted interface changes in current Microsoft products. It's been super annoying where I work, and staff are pretty upset.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
It was because CERN lost their academic discount for MS licensing. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-mum-cerns-planned-microsoft-alternatives-transition-open-source-software-price-hike/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-mum-cerns-planned-mi...
- addicted 7y ago
  This should be an HBS use case. In a quest for money they didn't need and likely were not gonna get much of anyways, by removing perks MS currently offered academic institutions, they've risked teh creation of a much greater threat that can undermine their entire business. CERN is an organization which could truly help create a set of alternative tools to MS products. Talk about killing the golden goose.
cwyers 7y ago
I mean, they list a pretty compelling reason from their point of view: Microsoft changed their licensing terms from academic to business licenses, which are more expensive. I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses, unless this is just a way of trying to leverage MS into giving them academic licenses again.
- perlgeek 7y ago
  > I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses I suspect the switching costs will be higher in the short term for sure, but this also seems to be a strategic move.
- nullspace 7y ago
  They say that the licensing costs increased by "by more than a factor of ten". Given that figure, do you really think that one-time project implementation and switching costs amortized over the next X years + ongoing support would really come to more than 10x? How do you make such a strong claim that easily, any prior examples? Not saying you're obviously wrong or that CERN is obviously right, but this seems to be a much harder call (and intuitively feels right in fact), given the number.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    There was a push in Germany to migrate to Linux, and they eventually gave up on that, so yeah, there are some prior examples. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-era-linux-pioneer-munich-confirms-switch-to-windows-10/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dump_linux/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dum...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - chappi42 7y ago
      Politics, bureaucracy, incompetence. Munich wasted a lot of money. Edit: here [1] is a good article (unfortunately in German) about the reasons. [1]: https://www.golem.de/news/limux-die-tragische-geschichte-eines-leuchtturm-projekts-1702-126230.html https://www.golem.de/news/limux-die-tragische-geschichte-ein...
    - tasuki 7y ago
      Do you know why they gave up? Did Linux not work for them? Or were they persuaded by the MS sales team?
      - fock 7y ago
        I guess it's a little bit of both. First mistake they made was that they tasked local contractors (think O(1) people) with forking their very own linux distro from Ubuntu. Then they put a lot of ressources into the KDE3-fork which was made to look like Windows NT (because they were migrating from that in 200x and you know the secretaries for life...). In the end they wondered why all their application software was old and buggy and I suppose from the whole project there was no significant contract work upstreamed (think LO performance patches...). Also being 1% of the market apparently does not entice any competition in the public software (think access-frontends in VB6@1000€s per place) market. Given this, some years ago, the mayor changed, Accenture did a 'cost' study and MS moved its german HQ to the city.
- eitland 7y ago
  > I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses, Can't speak for large organizations but some of the more well functioning places I have worked on has been running without much Microsoft services. Also for many of us sysadmins in many cases we would say we would possibly save more from not having to deal with the hassle that is Windows than from just the licenses. I mean: having to run and patch Apache httpd or other standard technologies on Windows is such a major hassle compared to Ubuntu or or any other mainstream commercial distro. You can of course just use IIS, but then you have to deal with the hassle that is IIS. This is a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea that Windows is somehow easier for everything is a bit unnuanced I think.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    You're talking about servers. I would bet credits to navy beans that most of the licenses are for workstations and laptops.
    - eitland 7y ago
      In that case, even better: (edit: I estimate) half the people at work run Linux or Mac. Linux percentage seems to be rising. Officialy IT don't support Linux. Unofficially they'll be happy to make sure everything works. We threw out MS Office many moons ago anyway, and management switched first and with genuine enthusiasm so it was no problem to get the rest of the company on board ;-) And this is not the first place: Already in 2009 - 2012 I worked for two places like that; well one of them went further and almost completely banned Windows because the IT manager couldn't stand it. The other place just had a policy to let people choose, -and a dev team that would encourage people to pick Macs. From 2015 I've been free to choose my own OS again.
      - cwyers 7y ago
        Your experience is very different from mine. A cursory review of usage stats and other things indicates that my experience is probably far more typical.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  But CERN is academic what do you think all those people doing PHD's

My gut says this is related to forced updates and unwanted interface changes in current Microsoft products. It's been super annoying where I work, and staff are pretty upset.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

It was because CERN lost their academic discount for MS licensing. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-mum-cerns-planned-microsoft-alternatives-transition-open-source-software-price-hike/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-mum-cerns-planned-mi...

addicted 7y ago
This should be an HBS use case. In a quest for money they didn't need and likely were not gonna get much of anyways, by removing perks MS currently offered academic institutions, they've risked teh creation of a much greater threat that can undermine their entire business. CERN is an organization which could truly help create a set of alternative tools to MS products. Talk about killing the golden goose.

cwyers 7y ago

I mean, they list a pretty compelling reason from their point of view: Microsoft changed their licensing terms from academic to business licenses, which are more expensive. I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses, unless this is just a way of trying to leverage MS into giving them academic licenses again.

perlgeek 7y ago
> I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses I suspect the switching costs will be higher in the short term for sure, but this also seems to be a strategic move.
nullspace 7y ago
They say that the licensing costs increased by "by more than a factor of ten". Given that figure, do you really think that one-time project implementation and switching costs amortized over the next X years + ongoing support would really come to more than 10x? How do you make such a strong claim that easily, any prior examples? Not saying you're obviously wrong or that CERN is obviously right, but this seems to be a much harder call (and intuitively feels right in fact), given the number.
- cwyers 7y ago
  There was a push in Germany to migrate to Linux, and they eventually gave up on that, so yeah, there are some prior examples. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-era-linux-pioneer-munich-confirms-switch-to-windows-10/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dump_linux/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dum...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - chappi42 7y ago
    Politics, bureaucracy, incompetence. Munich wasted a lot of money. Edit: here [1] is a good article (unfortunately in German) about the reasons. [1]: https://www.golem.de/news/limux-die-tragische-geschichte-eines-leuchtturm-projekts-1702-126230.html https://www.golem.de/news/limux-die-tragische-geschichte-ein...
  - tasuki 7y ago
    Do you know why they gave up? Did Linux not work for them? Or were they persuaded by the MS sales team?
    - fock 7y ago
      I guess it's a little bit of both. First mistake they made was that they tasked local contractors (think O(1) people) with forking their very own linux distro from Ubuntu. Then they put a lot of ressources into the KDE3-fork which was made to look like Windows NT (because they were migrating from that in 200x and you know the secretaries for life...). In the end they wondered why all their application software was old and buggy and I suppose from the whole project there was no significant contract work upstreamed (think LO performance patches...). Also being 1% of the market apparently does not entice any competition in the public software (think access-frontends in VB6@1000€s per place) market. Given this, some years ago, the mayor changed, Accenture did a 'cost' study and MS moved its german HQ to the city.
eitland 7y ago
> I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses, Can't speak for large organizations but some of the more well functioning places I have worked on has been running without much Microsoft services. Also for many of us sysadmins in many cases we would say we would possibly save more from not having to deal with the hassle that is Windows than from just the licenses. I mean: having to run and patch Apache httpd or other standard technologies on Windows is such a major hassle compared to Ubuntu or or any other mainstream commercial distro. You can of course just use IIS, but then you have to deal with the hassle that is IIS. This is a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea that Windows is somehow easier for everything is a bit unnuanced I think.
- cwyers 7y ago
  You're talking about servers. I would bet credits to navy beans that most of the licenses are for workstations and laptops.
  - eitland 7y ago
    In that case, even better: (edit: I estimate) half the people at work run Linux or Mac. Linux percentage seems to be rising. Officialy IT don't support Linux. Unofficially they'll be happy to make sure everything works. We threw out MS Office many moons ago anyway, and management switched first and with genuine enthusiasm so it was no problem to get the rest of the company on board ;-) And this is not the first place: Already in 2009 - 2012 I worked for two places like that; well one of them went further and almost completely banned Windows because the IT manager couldn't stand it. The other place just had a policy to let people choose, -and a dev team that would encourage people to pick Macs. From 2015 I've been free to choose my own OS again.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      Your experience is very different from mine. A cursory review of usage stats and other things indicates that my experience is probably far more typical.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
But CERN is academic what do you think all those people doing PHD's