Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol. Microsoft is utterly terrified of Linux making the jump from servers to the workplace. It's arguably a much bigger threat than home users switching since businesses could switch many thousands of machines at once
For MS, home users have been a "total cost of ownership" element in their b2b sales pitch. With home users familiar with basic MS software usage from home, MS can argue that businesses do not have to sped as much on training new employees if said businesses use MS products.
Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
41–50 of 177 posts
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#42Hm.. "At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape". "At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in…
Accenture will get you the answers Microsoft needs regardless of your situation. You can count on it.
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#43Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#44Hm.. "At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape". "At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in…
Accenture is an unbiased source in this. They will give you the pro's and con's of a number of high-margin products from Microsoft. You'll know which of them is best for you. You will not find them slanted enough to tell you to port your infrastructure to Windows 2012 on dedicated servers over instances of your current 2003 Servers running on Windows 2012 with HyperV. They wouldn't push that over a cost-efficient imp…
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accenture is an unbiased source in this. They will give you the pro's and con's of a number of high-margin products from Microsoft. You'll know which of them is best for you. You will not find them slanted enough to tell you to port your infrastructure to Windows 2012 on dedicated servers over instances of your current 2003 Servers running on Windows 2012 with HyperV. They wouldn't push that over a cost-efficient imp…
I always got the impression companies like Accenture were brought in to "evaluate the landscape" when the company bringing them in already had an opinion and could use an outsider confirming their opinion.
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#46Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing…
Honestly as a sysadmin who has been trying to push FOSS in the workplace, I can say the number one barrier is simply lack of neuralplasticity in older people and an unwillingness to learn new things. Combined with a lack of backing from management, it's a recipe for an overworked IT team that is probably already getting crapped on politcally and budgetarily, which is what I suspect has happened in Munich. While I thi…
My hope for Europe is lost in this regard, but I think Russia or China could come up with something interesting.
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#47Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.
Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users
And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.
Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users
Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all.
The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so.
In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.
Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
#50I am deeply suspicious of the motives here... Yes I'm sure people moan about IT. They moan about Windows where I work. They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago. Libre office is perfectly capable for most users, and is very compatible with MS Office. It is easy for users to transition too. I doubt any of this has anything to do with any of those points.
My understanding has quill usage declining more like 200 years ago.