5 ms·
Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out Microsoft
- doener 1y agoMore points and comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
- ErrorNoBrain 1y agosome munincipalities have already started the process, incl the 2nd largest one with ~half a million citizens. they save money in the process, switching to a non-american based cloud provider.
- oever 1y agoCan provide (links with) details on these migrations?
- buyucu 1y agophasing out Microsoft products is not hard. the only real difficulty is that corporate IT departs are populated with people who have built their entire careers on the Microsoft ecosystem and can't imagine a world beyond Microsoft.
- jimbokun 1y agoHaving to replace all of your IT employees sounds pretty hard to me. Or at least train them and get them to buy into a different platform.
- buyucu 1y agoyou don't need to replace them. retraining them is pretty easy. but these people have invested their careers in the microsoft ecosystem, and will not initiate this kind of change on their own. they need to be pushed.
- oytis 1y agoTrue. It is already happened at least once in Germany that a municipality decided to ditch MS products in favour of open source, and went back after people started complaining that buttons are in the wrong places.
- RajT88 1y agoIt wasn't about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux It was about many things.
- oytis 1y agoThank you, that's what I had in mind. The timeline is an amusing read, but as I read it it's really a mix of "buttons in the wrong places" and lobbying.
- RajT88 1y agoThe thing which stood out to me was the office suite incompatibility statement. It's probably a legit complaint, but still potentially the fault of Microsoft. People learn how to use Excel, and the free alternative suites don't have all the same functionality (or if they do, it's not the same UI so you have to re-learn it). And with as prolific as Office is, you're going to have to open office documents. If that doesn't work cleanly, that's a big issue. I haven't looked into if whatever incompatibilities are a result of Microsoft pressure or technical shenanigans, or it just being a natural consequence of the free suites being less well funded in their development efforts. I don't think it's impossible to run an enterprise with FOSS - but it is not easy.
- jansan 1y agoAlso, AFAIR Bill Gates personally and in person intervened and paid a visit to Munich's mayor Christian Ude. Here is an interview with Christian Ude in which he mentiones that Bill Gates was unable to understand how reying on Microsoft products would make a city "dependent": https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/ https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
- lenerdenator 1y agoPeople prefer familiar tools with which to do their jobs and do not like new tools that reduce their perceived productivity. Film at 10.
- buyucu 1y agoNothing new or innovative happens with this backwards mindset.
- lenerdenator 1y agoMost people do not care. They want to make their customer happy, make their paycheck, deposit it, and live a little on the weekends. Then repeat that for the next 30-50 years until the paycheck goes to a funeral and burial plot. Replacing MS with something else (really, anything else, American or otherwise) doesn't result in anything new or innovative anyways. It's document editing and database management. Your city government was doing it with a Commodore 64 in the 1980s.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThat is out of touch for professional users. There is nothing on the planet that competes with Excel. Sure there is spreadsheet software, but nothing that has all of the power and features that experts expect. It would be like if your manager came in and said, “We are switching away from your expensive jetbrains IDE. You can just use notepad, right?”
- betaby 1y ago> There is nothing on the planet that competes with Excel Debatable. Even then, why that matters? I would think 90% of the world population never used Excel anyway. > You can just use notepad, right? No, you are missing the point. Intentionally.
- esafak 1y agoExcel is powerful? Does it do forecasting, statistics or machine learning? Only in a rudimentary sense. Spreadsheets like Excel are low-code tools. Experts in those domains use a real programming language. People use Excel because it is familiar, because it has distribution. They don't (care to) know any alternatives. If they'd never been familiar with Excel they wouldn't ask for it.
- wenc 1y agoAs a former ML engineer, Excel is a surprisingly practical tool even for ML folks. It’s a very tactile tool to touch and feel your data and do quick what ifs without doing a lot of coding. Want a graph? Plot it instead of fudging with matplotlib. Forecasting? Yes. Dynamic formulas? Yes — much better than writing code (you’d have to write a reactive widget in Jupyter). Most people don’t need to do ML but they need to do complicated formulas and get immediate feedback. Excel is really good at that. Libre office can do 90% of it but Excel has some advanced features that it doesn’t come close to.
- esafak 1y agoExcel is for playing with data that is already aggregated. You don't see any data scientist in a tech company reaching for spreadsheets. Business analysts use them, maybe, because they work with the raw data rolled up by the engineers. How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it. edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.
- mindaslab 1y agoTime to bribe and enslave Denmark as Microsoft's slave. Or slap sanctions on it, till it buckles.
- jaimsam 1y ago[dead]
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- jimbokun 1y agoI remember when stories like this about moving off Microsoft products was somewhat shocking. Now I'm somewhat shocked that a government is still stuck on Microsoft products.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoThe way Denmark works is that at some point an inflection point will be hit - I think about 30% of computers being off MS, and then there will be a stampede and everyone will be off MS in the year.
- jopsen 1y agoLol, I wouldn't bet on us getting to that infliction point. All of this will be forgotten when the orange monkey is gone. So if it has to happen it has to happen yesterday.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoIf they started to actually build their own infrastructure 10 years ago, we would probably have very advanced and secure government OS and tools complementing usual use cases. China did it because it is capable. I am not yet convinced that Europe will not bungle it again. In recent times talking 2 minutes about technical issues is too much mental strain for a lot of people that need to make decisions. You don't have to be a geek to understand these issues, just some basic critical thinking skills would suffice. There is also risk here, but it should be easy to mitigate that. Also, people need training to use different applications.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoWhere are they moving to?
- martin_bech 1y agoIn this instance, they sre trying out libre office
- phkamp 1y agoPlease note that only ~79 employees will be affected by this decision, which, taken in context, looks a lot like just political posturing in preparation for "Folkemødet" the week-long politician+lobbyist festival going on this week.
- declan_roberts 1y agoIf they try and use Open Office I'm going to laugh. The people who say Open Office is great are the same people who say Linux Desktop is great for non-technical users. They're completely oblivious to the shortcomings. Impossible to get through to them, and they're perpetually clueless why most people will choose things like Gdocs and Microsoft.
- isu 1y agoLaugh or not, I installed Ubuntu on my partner’s mom laptop, she didn’t notice a difference, and she used Windows before that. The only people who had trouble with Ubuntu were IT support employees of a local telecom provider when they needed to configure a network on the laptop.
- dijit 1y agoWhile I agree with you regarding libreoffice. My tech illiterate mother got on a lot easier with modern desktop linux than she did with modern desktop windows. Windows enjoys "ease of use" because of inertia, talk to someone who hasn't used Windows since XP and they'll find KDE a hell of a lot easier than whatever the fuck Windows 11 is doing.
- ganyu 1y agoLet's just say Windows 11 is a complete different OS compared to Windows 7 lest 10. That's still not counting Windows 11 being a new OS every couple of months, packed with brand new AI features that literally breaks your entire workflow because it's "more AI".
- wg0 1y agoIt's unfortunate that Microsoft is transforming their OS into an advertising hub. You can't login without a Microsoft account and such. A better direction for Microsoft is to make it free for personal use and charge the businesses.
- somenameforme 1y agoTo let you pick what I assume is the lowest hanging fruit, what are the most significant short comings of e.g. Calc vs Excel? I use it casually, but "casually" in a way that would probably be at least equivalent to professional use in most cases, and can't recall ever ending up with a blocking issue. So I'm certainly oblivious to the shortcomings and would love to know!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- samch 1y agoSo many of the comments are focusing on Office products. Okay, that’s fair. People can talk Calc vs Excel for example, and that’s fair. What I don’t get is how you replicate knowledge worker collaboration without using a major commercial provider like Google Workspace or M365. How do you handle the use cases solved by collaborative document editing, SharePoint / OneDrive, Teams with DLP, document classification, etc. I’m not affiliated with Google or MSFT, just genuinely curious how you replace the broader ecosystem around the core Office products using open-source solutions. Has anybody solved for this?
- _davide_ 1y agohttps://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/ Both works pretty well
- kobe19900701 1y agoSpændende! Det bliver interessant at se, om det lykkes at mindske afhængigheden af Microsoft. Håber virkelig, Libre Office kan leve op til forventningerne.