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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

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Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#61

Post by nasmorn »

jack_tripper wrote: post #4

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

Frank Stronach needs to lead a Hundertschaft unternehmerischer nachhaltiger Digitalisierung.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#62

Post by infp_arborist »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#63

Post by moooo99 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #52
criticalfault wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent alternative is made. Everything that the government should spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization to develop a new office suite. Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use. Everyone I proposed this to tried it an…

> Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought in anyone's mind. > Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use. You only feel this way because you're use…

> You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office.

You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#64

Post by thesuitonym »

criticalfault wrote: post #58
thesuitonym wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought in anyone's mind. > Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use. You only feel this way because you're use…

Yes Microsoft Office was already dominant. Why didn't libre office affect this dominance being 'so good'? It's also free, so it should be interesting to companies, right? Wrong. I recently set up an SME who when saw it ran away and immediately bought a Microsoft license, which means they would rather pay and be spied on than use libre office. Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft Office looks nice. Li…

If your criteria for a good alternative is people like it the very first time they see it, you'll never find a good alternative.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#66

Post by Ajedi32 »

harvey9 wrote: post #49
Ajedi32 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On time and under budget is relative to what you set the budget and deadlines to in the first place. If these companies had to rewrite Excel from scratch for every client I guarantee you the budgeted cost would be a lot higher (and they'd probably still go over that figure).

Nobody suggested rewriting Excel or even customising libre office. These projects are often ERPs which get customised to the client's requirements. Chaos and ballooning costs often follow for all the usual reasons.

My point is "completely different than the other government" is only true to an extent. Even with significant customization, there's still a lot shared which benefits immensely from economies of scale. As you said, nobody's rewriting Excel.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#67

Post by tsimionescu »

atonse wrote: post #21
tsimionescu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider. The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space. If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try…

The problem isn't that governments can't hire programmers. It's that they refuse to hire programmers, and prefer to pay the same consultancies for the same programs over and over again.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#68

Post by franga2000 »

mk89 wrote: post #33
jack_tripper wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business. With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did. We're talking abou…

I am not talking about the Austrian people's skills ;) I bet the employees from Atos were locals, so... I am talking about politicians that are supposed to create the conditions to set this up in a proper, honest and "good" way. As soon as this becomes a "department", nextcloud is not an option because it lacks xyz. So let's reimplement it worse . All this to justify the need for having an IT department at all. This…

But this is the exact issue you have with IT outsourcing - instead of taking the obvious and sustainable solution, there's a clause somewhere in the 500 page requirements doc that doesn't even make any sense, but means you have to use something nonstandard and even add some of your own hacks on top. Because it's a tender, you can't really change the spec and you don't care to either, because a terrible bodge means they have to go back to you whenever it needs changes/fixes.

An in-house development department on the other hand doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of tenders and the development team can actually work with the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or boost their corporate partners through technology choices.

This is an unprecedented case where a private company decided to go the open source route for a government project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick open source.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#69

Post by rcbdev »

embedding-shape wrote: post #12
jack_tripper wrote: post #4

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos. From the article: > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements. So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whate…

Atos is a gigantic French company. Fully Austrian companies like Noctua or Proxmox aren't even that famous within Austria, why would the average citizen here know about a French IT company?

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#70

Post by tsimionescu »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #24
tsimionescu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider. The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free. The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great out…

The economies of scale would work exactly the other way than you think. Right now, the same company can sell the same solution for the same money to 20 government agencies, ones that have broadly similar needs, because it costs too much for anyone else to compete with them. The company then extracts massive profit from every subsequent project, with none of the savings going to the government. And even if a new player wins some of the contracts, they have to start from scratch and thus need to charge similar prices.

If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.

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