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Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

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51–60 of 78 posts

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#51
post #15

They should just get office 365 and use the online version of word Excel and PowerPoint in chromium. That's better than libre office and they won't need to switch to windows 10.

They'd still produce documents in proprietary software, which is one of the reasons they migrated the first time. A government should not set itself up in a way that requires software from a specific vendor to interact with it.

The proprietary nature of the software doesn’t matter. All that matters is that their FILES can be read and written. And with Office XML, since 2007, this is a solved problem.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#52
post #15

They should just get office 365 and use the online version of word Excel and PowerPoint in chromium. That's better than libre office and they won't need to switch to windows 10.

They'd still produce documents in proprietary software, which is one of the reasons they migrated the first time. A government should not set itself up in a way that requires software from a specific vendor to interact with it.

The software is proprietary, but the actual files use a variant of an open ISO/IEC/ECMA standard.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#53
post #10

That's not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million: >€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution, The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway. Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I'm not claiming it's cheaper in either direction, but staffing…

The hardware replacement cost must be realised because of Windows 10 compatibility, the old computers don't support it. Same problem hits on Win 7 to Win 10 transition.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#54
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he was referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel

So Kirchturmpolitik (based on Wikipedia's linked German article).

Literally "church tower politics"—a beautiful reflection of the different focus between European concerns and US concerns historically....

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#55
post #21

I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

Python works for data scientists, but the people who use Excel are not all data scientists. Python and Excel are as comparable as apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but that's literally all they have in common.

People are looking for something better than Excel though, particularly for teams. Raw python won't work, it would be a chaos of copy pasted receipes and voodoo... VBA is bad enough.

The spreadsheet model could be leveraged, but without free form tables and formula repetition. I'm torn about whether allowing explicit recursion or iteration is a good idea. It would have to include a visionary visual debugger.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#57
post #21

I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

That's a drop in the ocean.

It can be a spark and all go downhill from there. You only need the first sucess example.

* Governments/Councils start using this as an example.

* Companies that work with the council start supporting Linux and LibreOffice.

* Council worker might get a Linux as the next personal laptop buy.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#58
post #21

I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

Moving excel to python is entirely irrelevant here because this subject is not about an average human trying to use a text editor for general things (like writing documentation).

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#59
post #21

I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

Python works for data scientists, but the people who use Excel are not all data scientists. Python and Excel are as comparable as apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but that's literally all they have in common.

Yes. But one of the arguments, in my previous company, for Excel over LO Calc, was speed for lots of data, data sources speed... With more tooling around the end user data will be less and more clean/prepared.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#60

I've always found it suspicious that they essentially ended up with their own Distro.

Rolling your own distro is a sensible thing to do for a big installation. Thanks to open source, you can take an existing distro (Ubuntu, in this case) and modify it, until it suits your needs. Some people prefer to call such a thing »spin« or »blend«.
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