4 ms·

phasing 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

• jimbokun 1y ago
  Having 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 ago
    you 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 ago
  True. 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 ago
    It wasn't about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux It was about many things.
    • oytis 1y ago
      Thank 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 ago
        The 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 ago
      Also, 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/
      • RajT88 1y ago
        Translated to English, but this is quite a quote: > Funnily enough, during the conversation, he kept making new financial offers, including what Microsoft would add to the price, for the school department, for example. They continually became cheaper by a million, another million, another million, and later a dozen million. That's how important the symbol of the renegade state capital of Munich, internationally perceived as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft. This was Ballmer though, not gates. Maybe Gates had a separate visit.
  • buyucu 1y ago
    they will complain for two weeks, and then get used to it. 90% of all users just use a browser. it's not hard to switch.
    • oytis 1y ago
      It did already happen though. It's not just about buttons of course, there is a lot of lobbying, and if other people you are working with (e.g. other municipalities) stay on MS stack, there are going to be compatibility issues that will of course be blamed on the outliers.
      • SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
        The Wikipedia article doesn't make it obvious, but even Munich itself wasn't able to migrate everyone off of the MS stack. One of the linkrotted sources (https://web.archive.org/web/20180516042059/https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ditching-windows-for-linux-led-to-major-difficulties-says-open-source-champion-munich/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180516042059/https://www.techr...) says they had about 17% of computers running Windows after the migration "completed" because some required programs couldn't run on their Linux distro. It's not obvious whether the working model was that 17% of staff used Windows exclusively or all staff had to find a Windows box to do some of their work, but either one sounds pretty obnoxious to me.
  • skywal_l 1y ago
    It seems to me that the windows UI interface change also very often. Between the excel of win95 and today's there is a big difference. So it can't be the reason.
    • hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      I'm really tired of all the overhauls - Win 11 and now Apple.
  • izacus 1y ago
    Except that in reality the issues weren't just buttons in real places, but actual serious issues with work flows, right? Kinda dishonest framing there.
• lenerdenator 1y ago
  People 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 ago
    Nothing new or innovative happens with this backwards mindset.
    • lenerdenator 1y ago
      Most 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    Excel 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 ago
      As 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 ago
        Excel 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.