3 ms·
> One example of vendor-lock the study cites is a procurement process in which the Department of Agriculture in 2021 spent $112 million more to buy Microsoft Of
by l5870uoo9y 3y ago
> One example of vendor-lock the study cites is a procurement process in which the Department of Agriculture in 2021 spent $112 million more to buy Microsoft Office than Google Workspace to avoid switching costs that it perceived to be even higher.
This just shows how incredible ingrained the preference for MS is and how ridiculous expensive it is. Technically a Ubuntu with a browser and Libreoffice should suffice for 99% of a their work and even if one department or office wanted to try this, they likely wouldn't be allowed due to some regulation pushed from the top.
- alephnerd 3y agoMS had first mover advantage in the Fed and hired much better Sales and PS Engineers than Google or AWS, and also believes that the customer is always right. For example, when Agencies were deciding between AWS and Azure almost a decade ago, Azure offered to make their entire infra FedRAMP compliant by default, but AWS felt the cost would be way too high upfront so they built GovCloud from scratch. Also, organizations want someone to yell at when their entire infrastructure went down at 2am on Saturday. Using free/open source sofrware doesn't come with support or services, unless you hire a company, hence why RedHat/IBM Linux, SUSE Linux (most conglomerates in DACH uses this because of their partnership with SAP), and Oracle Linux exist.