Earlier quoted context omitted.
partial counter-point: many large companies, universities, schools etc have switched to things like Google Docs. Most use of office software is simple enough that people can transfer (afaik a big part in the Munich migration was making sure all the templates used for common documents where ported properly and people could easily access to). Specialist software is a big problem of course, likely leading to a parallel…
That is not really a counter point though. I mean, education is part of a municipality, it makes up around 15% of our work force, and you’re right, they could probably be switched to Linux. That doesn’t really make sense though, because our IT staff can’t support it, so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.
As someone who supports both Windows and Linux laptops, if you switched to Linux your support staff would eventually halve. The control you have over Linux is so tight, its relative immunity viruses, to staff playing with it and adverse Microsoft "upgrades" so good that support literally drops to whatever it takes to keep the hardware going. Or to put it another way: if you need to re-image a Linux laptop, it's because the disk drive broke.
Mind you, it takes a while to get to that point. And you need someone with real Linux expertise. Real Linux expertise unfortunately means when a problem arises gets to the point you would give up and re-image Windows, instead with Linux you haul out the source, and find the root cause. But if you can do that you will be able to drive the software defect rate to near zero.
Or to put it another way again: Windows licences are the price to pay if you don't / can't pay for that sort of expertise, so you are trapped into paying to do it for you. Unfortunately Microsoft is a monopoly, so you end up paying a fair bit more. I'll grant you small enterprises don't have much choice. But I'd expect someone with 1200 employees does have the choice.