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Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficien

Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficiency". It's that they only know Microsoft, they don't want to learn something else, and if there's a problem, it's Microsoft's fault, no theirs, so they don't have to deal with their own incompetence. If you want an anecdote, we were working with SAS, a statistical software which required costly licences (more than a million € for a few dozens of workers). I suggested to switch to R or Python to the top director, who agreed. First meeting with the service in charge, the chief opens with "ok, we are asked to change, but the goal here is to show that we tried, and found that it's not possible." I resigned a few months after, as everything was in the same vein.

mananaysiempre 1y ago
The French state is one thing, the Polytéchnique is another. My impression is the old-school network administrators at French universities are fiercely protective of their de facto right to make technical decisions regarding equipment and software. So this part surprises me.
stef25 1y ago
This addiction to Microsoft is everywhere and it's terrible for everyone involved. So many small orgs and NGOs paying through the nose for what can be done for free with Google Docs & Sheets.
- mr_mitm 1y ago
  Relying on yet another American mega corp instead of Microsoft doesn't seem very wise.
- gunalx 1y ago
  ^foss alternatives like onlyoffice, nextcloud...
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  NGOs pay little compared to businesses, AFAIR.
- oytis 1y ago
  Using proprietary software that is given away for free is even worse than paying for proprietary software - at least you have a contract in the latter case. Governments should pay software engineers and system administrators (or infrastructure engineers if you like) to build and run their systems, ideally open sourcing whatever makes sense
  - Saline9515 1y ago
    Google isn't free for non-personal use.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  Yeah, but Google Docs and Sheets are really worse than Word/Excel for many uses/users. I’d be pretty peeved if my employer decided to save figurative pennies by making me use Google Docs/Sheets. And Google Docs/Sheets isn’t really free once you need business functionality. Depends what exactly what your feature requirements are, but Google Workspace pricing has about the same range as Office 365 Enterprise. ($10-$50/user/month)
dataflow 1y ago
When you say first meeting, is the implication that they were lying about even trying?
- buckle8017 1y ago
  He outright said their goal was to lie about trying.
- crinkly 1y ago
  This is fairly normal. I’ve seen it in every corporate job I’ve had. Most people seemed to have a retirement clock running and wanted to avoid doing anything they don’t give a crap about until then. Giving a crap about your job is an outlier.
  - Yeul 1y ago
    It's funny that capitalism rewards jobs that have meaning- healthcare, education- the least.
    - mistrial9 1y ago
      ok so "funny" but historically, it has been worse. Like the legend of a warrior King in a region towards modern Hungary.. the school teachers would be ordered to stop work when the King and his military advisors rode on the main road for inspection. All the teachers were required to stop and clean the litter by the road as the King passed by. Perhaps the implication is -- if you do not have my military protection, then your school would be burned by invaders? actually not wrong in some places, but can you blame that scene on "capitalism" ? Want to guess the expenses of the armor and servants for the King and their party? probably more coins than were spent on teachers, who were paid in farm produce and exchange services?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > capitalism rewards jobs that have meaning- healthcare, education- the least Doctors and researchers do quite well when they're effective.
moritzwarhier 1y ago
Sounds like Germany, and it's not just public services. I used to work part-time in 1st level IT support in a local hospital when I was younger. The main "theme" of my superior's work subjects there (2009-2016) was the migration from XP to 7. You heard that right. And apart from the usual Office- and AD-Lock-In, the most problematic workstations of course were always ones with very specialized software. Virtualization and terminal services were in use, but the whole selling point of Windows was mostly put ad absurdum already, because they needed Windows licenses for dedicated machines running e.g. specialized MRT software, but those weren't even part of the main network anyway. They needed arcane syncing procedures anyway and Windows provided no value whatsoever on these devices. Same for the patient monitoring systems on ICU beds. These were using some "embedded" Windows and were rarely working in a stable way at all, nor way they connected to the networks running AD or the CIS (edit: seems it's called HIS in English) CAD and stuff in the office divisions was similar, but with less integration needs (apart from network printing) What I'm trying to say is: like in many offices, any slight change made users hostile, updates cost obscene amounts of work and money, and Windows didn't provide much more value compared to SAMBA. That is dated experience, I know. But MS has not shown to be a trustworthy company in any of my work experience so far. It was impossible to create working solutions without MS, yes, but the reasons for that never seemed to be grounded in actual value provided by an MS-centric software and networking structure. It was just the one available commercial solution with enough adoption, and MS has been milking their target markets with these strategies for a very long time. Making themselves "indispensable", even in machines where their software was used to run a terminal server, basically. Hell, in my town, 3 years ago, they started to replace subway train LED signals with crappy Windows-CE-based software. The effects are still noticeable... the whole infrastructure is still 80% worse compared to 10 years ago. You recognize the useless Windows licenses by the occasional Desktop (seriously, google "cologne KVB windows trashcan"....), 90deg-tilted display, and of course 20% of the signage is out of operation on average now.
- sampl3username 1y ago
  I also had an encounter with government software... I think the long-lasting solution will be to move to a web-based application system, instead of depending on Desktop applications made for Windows or Linux. Using a web app system, the government only has to concern itself with proper development and maintenance of servers and web apps, and the public workers can use any operating system with a web browser.
arnaudsm 1y ago
I've lived the exact same scenario in a large public company. Large orgs and misaligned incentives are not exclusive to the public sector.
duxup 1y ago
Even when I see "so and so place is switching to X" I always think "uh, do your current Microsoft people ... know how to do that?" I'm all for training and making the switch, but you gotta get your teams motivated / what they need to do the job. If not IT can resist like few other orgs.
sofixa 1y ago
> Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficiency While this is generally not wrong, the French state still uses and creates open source software extensively. Gendermerie Nationale have their own Linux distribution ; Ministry of Foreign Affairs runs Debian for diplomatic personnel. Multiple pieces of public software was developed out in the open (including the government SSO and the COVID tracking app). So while there is definitely bad, it has been getting progressively better over the past ~10 years.
tsimionescu 1y ago
Switching from a working, integrated solution (SAS) to a untested collection of random scripts (R or Python??) is a horrendous idea, and I would be willing to bet that the people in charge of implementing this brilliant move saved the French state quite a bit of money by blocking it. If they had started with the R or with Python, that would have likely been a better solution - but that doesn't mean that switching, especially just because some new employee convinced the director they'd save money with a half-baked idea, is not. I work for a company whose entire business is basically replacing various dedicated internal tooling scripts with an integrated, extremely costly solution, and we mostly sell to other businesses. Most people who buy this are extremely happy to get rid of their kludge of scripts, and we very rarely feel pressure from such alternatives (our other B2B, also extremely expensive, competitors, are the main thing we get compared with). Specialized software often works much better, and makes a lot of sense past some scale, than in-house solutions. Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government.
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  > Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government. Are you serious? Especially when officials working for well-respected international organizations are being sanctioned for their work out of political reasons? This entire article wouldn't exist if there were no geopolitical risk. From the article: > “Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,'” the report stated. If this isn't geopolitical risk, I don't know what is. It's clear that your stated job constantly exposed you to all the talking points of mega cloud platforms. But there are negative consequences too, and they're very real.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Oops, I've made a huge mistake here, apologies. I confused SAS for SAP, the German business stats company. My post was entirely from this wrong perspective, that it would be replacing EU business software with open source software. In light of the new understanding, I fully agree with you that it was extremely shortsighted and sad to have tech leadership oppose a project which directly gives a US company access to such sensitive data with open source alternatives.
shin_lao 1y ago
You may be underestimating the depth of scope of SAS. You can't just replace it with "a bunch of R and Python scripts".
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Depends on what you're doing, to be fair. R would probably be a better choice as it's more likely to have all the statistical stuff in SAS. Python might make sense if you want to integrate it into web/other systems. It's definitely not an easy lift and shift though, as the OP made it out to be. Particularly when you're integrating with other departments it's vital to have perfect compatibility as otherwise you'll break the other departments workflow.
rotis 1y ago
Everything else aside moving to R and Python to escape the USA hegemony means you are still dependend on Python Software Foundation and R Fundation. First is American. Second is based in Vienna, Austria yet still has big American presence among its members. So you end up still dependending on USA. Same with most free and open source. Even if its authors may appear to be European, they may turn out to be Americans (Linus Torvalds) or work for US company anyway (Guido van Rossum)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mananaysiempre 1y ago

The French state is one thing, the Polytéchnique is another. My impression is the old-school network administrators at French universities are fiercely protective of their de facto right to make technical decisions regarding equipment and software. So this part surprises me.

stef25 1y ago

This addiction to Microsoft is everywhere and it's terrible for everyone involved. So many small orgs and NGOs paying through the nose for what can be done for free with Google Docs & Sheets.

mr_mitm 1y ago
Relying on yet another American mega corp instead of Microsoft doesn't seem very wise.
gunalx 1y ago
^foss alternatives like onlyoffice, nextcloud...
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
NGOs pay little compared to businesses, AFAIR.
oytis 1y ago
Using proprietary software that is given away for free is even worse than paying for proprietary software - at least you have a contract in the latter case. Governments should pay software engineers and system administrators (or infrastructure engineers if you like) to build and run their systems, ideally open sourcing whatever makes sense
- Saline9515 1y ago
  Google isn't free for non-personal use.
Marsymars 1y ago
Yeah, but Google Docs and Sheets are really worse than Word/Excel for many uses/users. I’d be pretty peeved if my employer decided to save figurative pennies by making me use Google Docs/Sheets. And Google Docs/Sheets isn’t really free once you need business functionality. Depends what exactly what your feature requirements are, but Google Workspace pricing has about the same range as Office 365 Enterprise. ($10-$50/user/month)

dataflow 1y ago

When you say first meeting, is the implication that they were lying about even trying?

buckle8017 1y ago
He outright said their goal was to lie about trying.
crinkly 1y ago
This is fairly normal. I’ve seen it in every corporate job I’ve had. Most people seemed to have a retirement clock running and wanted to avoid doing anything they don’t give a crap about until then. Giving a crap about your job is an outlier.
- Yeul 1y ago
  It's funny that capitalism rewards jobs that have meaning- healthcare, education- the least.
  - mistrial9 1y ago
    ok so "funny" but historically, it has been worse. Like the legend of a warrior King in a region towards modern Hungary.. the school teachers would be ordered to stop work when the King and his military advisors rode on the main road for inspection. All the teachers were required to stop and clean the litter by the road as the King passed by. Perhaps the implication is -- if you do not have my military protection, then your school would be burned by invaders? actually not wrong in some places, but can you blame that scene on "capitalism" ? Want to guess the expenses of the armor and servants for the King and their party? probably more coins than were spent on teachers, who were paid in farm produce and exchange services?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > capitalism rewards jobs that have meaning- healthcare, education- the least Doctors and researchers do quite well when they're effective.

moritzwarhier 1y ago

Sounds like Germany, and it's not just public services. I used to work part-time in 1st level IT support in a local hospital when I was younger. The main "theme" of my superior's work subjects there (2009-2016) was the migration from XP to 7. You heard that right. And apart from the usual Office- and AD-Lock-In, the most problematic workstations of course were always ones with very specialized software. Virtualization and terminal services were in use, but the whole selling point of Windows was mostly put ad absurdum already, because they needed Windows licenses for dedicated machines running e.g. specialized MRT software, but those weren't even part of the main network anyway. They needed arcane syncing procedures anyway and Windows provided no value whatsoever on these devices. Same for the patient monitoring systems on ICU beds. These were using some "embedded" Windows and were rarely working in a stable way at all, nor way they connected to the networks running AD or the CIS (edit: seems it's called HIS in English) CAD and stuff in the office divisions was similar, but with less integration needs (apart from network printing) What I'm trying to say is: like in many offices, any slight change made users hostile, updates cost obscene amounts of work and money, and Windows didn't provide much more value compared to SAMBA. That is dated experience, I know. But MS has not shown to be a trustworthy company in any of my work experience so far. It was impossible to create working solutions without MS, yes, but the reasons for that never seemed to be grounded in actual value provided by an MS-centric software and networking structure. It was just the one available commercial solution with enough adoption, and MS has been milking their target markets with these strategies for a very long time. Making themselves "indispensable", even in machines where their software was used to run a terminal server, basically. Hell, in my town, 3 years ago, they started to replace subway train LED signals with crappy Windows-CE-based software. The effects are still noticeable... the whole infrastructure is still 80% worse compared to 10 years ago. You recognize the useless Windows licenses by the occasional Desktop (seriously, google "cologne KVB windows trashcan"....), 90deg-tilted display, and of course 20% of the signage is out of operation on average now.

sampl3username 1y ago
I also had an encounter with government software... I think the long-lasting solution will be to move to a web-based application system, instead of depending on Desktop applications made for Windows or Linux. Using a web app system, the government only has to concern itself with proper development and maintenance of servers and web apps, and the public workers can use any operating system with a web browser.

arnaudsm 1y ago

I've lived the exact same scenario in a large public company. Large orgs and misaligned incentives are not exclusive to the public sector.

duxup 1y ago

Even when I see "so and so place is switching to X" I always think "uh, do your current Microsoft people ... know how to do that?" I'm all for training and making the switch, but you gotta get your teams motivated / what they need to do the job. If not IT can resist like few other orgs.

sofixa 1y ago

> Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficiency While this is generally not wrong, the French state still uses and creates open source software extensively. Gendermerie Nationale have their own Linux distribution ; Ministry of Foreign Affairs runs Debian for diplomatic personnel. Multiple pieces of public software was developed out in the open (including the government SSO and the COVID tracking app). So while there is definitely bad, it has been getting progressively better over the past ~10 years.

tsimionescu 1y ago

Switching from a working, integrated solution (SAS) to a untested collection of random scripts (R or Python??) is a horrendous idea, and I would be willing to bet that the people in charge of implementing this brilliant move saved the French state quite a bit of money by blocking it. If they had started with the R or with Python, that would have likely been a better solution - but that doesn't mean that switching, especially just because some new employee convinced the director they'd save money with a half-baked idea, is not. I work for a company whose entire business is basically replacing various dedicated internal tooling scripts with an integrated, extremely costly solution, and we mostly sell to other businesses. Most people who buy this are extremely happy to get rid of their kludge of scripts, and we very rarely feel pressure from such alternatives (our other B2B, also extremely expensive, competitors, are the main thing we get compared with). Specialized software often works much better, and makes a lot of sense past some scale, than in-house solutions. Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government.

soraminazuki 1y ago
> Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government. Are you serious? Especially when officials working for well-respected international organizations are being sanctioned for their work out of political reasons? This entire article wouldn't exist if there were no geopolitical risk. From the article: > “Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,'” the report stated. If this isn't geopolitical risk, I don't know what is. It's clear that your stated job constantly exposed you to all the talking points of mega cloud platforms. But there are negative consequences too, and they're very real.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Oops, I've made a huge mistake here, apologies. I confused SAS for SAP, the German business stats company. My post was entirely from this wrong perspective, that it would be replacing EU business software with open source software. In light of the new understanding, I fully agree with you that it was extremely shortsighted and sad to have tech leadership oppose a project which directly gives a US company access to such sensitive data with open source alternatives.

shin_lao 1y ago

You may be underestimating the depth of scope of SAS. You can't just replace it with "a bunch of R and Python scripts".

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
Depends on what you're doing, to be fair. R would probably be a better choice as it's more likely to have all the statistical stuff in SAS. Python might make sense if you want to integrate it into web/other systems. It's definitely not an easy lift and shift though, as the OP made it out to be. Particularly when you're integrating with other departments it's vital to have perfect compatibility as otherwise you'll break the other departments workflow.

rotis 1y ago

Everything else aside moving to R and Python to escape the USA hegemony means you are still dependend on Python Software Foundation and R Fundation. First is American. Second is based in Vienna, Austria yet still has big American presence among its members. So you end up still dependending on USA. Same with most free and open source. Even if its authors may appear to be European, they may turn out to be Americans (Linus Torvalds) or work for US company anyway (Guido van Rossum)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]