
"Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints" - EdwardQ
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3348475/munich-mayor-says-switch-linux-is-much-cheaper-reduced-complaints/
======
cs702
Doubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very
difficult, costly, and disruptive. The _upfront_ costs of migration surely
exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more
waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs &
multi-year effort worth it?

The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer
is yes -- i.e., the migration's _recurring_ savings exceed its _upfront_
costs:

* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost _forever_ \-- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's _huge_.

* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost _forever_ \-- also _huge_.

* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost _forever_. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also _huge_.

If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate,
every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this
kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a
financial standpoint.

[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off
by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also
materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article
itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001
for pointing out my errors!]

~~~
edwinnathaniel
It's good for them that they haven't caught the "SharePoint" (and soon,
InfoPath) wave yet cause if they do, the migration cost will rise quite
significantly.

Most offices these days do use SharePoint heavily and some of the BAs started
their hands on InfoPath to make forms for data entry to SharePoint.

To make matter worse (or sweeter, depending your POV), these whole thing can
be acquired cheaper by using Office 365 (their cloud version of Office) plus
certain Office 365 offerings automatically gives you Office 2010 Professional
Plus for free. Sweet deal if you ask me.

Some of us would like to see Linux to win the battle especially when it comes
to cost perspective. Unfortunately, Microsoft took notes and they had adjusted
their licensing cost as well.

For example: in the K-12 sector, I heard schools are getting 90% discounts.
Ninety percent discounts.....

~~~
rbanffy
> It's good for them that they haven't caught the "SharePoint" (and soon,
> InfoPath) wave yet cause if they do, the migration cost will rise quite
> significantly.

You must not forget to factor in the huge pain of living _with_ SharePoint. A
good friend of mine, heavy Microsoft user (and advocate) regularly complains
about downtime and data loss because of their SharePoint install. They were
forced into it because Microsoft is one of their most important clients and
demanded that they use it (or they'd move their business to a competitor)

~~~
DrStalker
I've worked with corporate SharePoint and never heard any complaints about
downtime; I've even manage a messy SharePoint environment that was left to
"rot" with insufficient maintenance (both on SharePoint and on the servers)
and it never went down.

Where we did have big problems was finding developers to work with it; we
actually found a few that had worked with it but deliberately avoiding listing
it as a skill because they did not want to ever work with it again. (in Sydney
a few years ago)

------
bdunbar
_"... and reduced user complaints"_

When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload
files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...

"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to
the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."

My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not
having anything fixed. It's still broken."

The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping
started. Entertaining.

[1] He was retiring in a few months.

~~~
wccrawford
Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole
thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.

It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs
from there.

It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's
often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have
to fix it after all.)

It's also horrible on morale.

~~~
ams6110
Or they will stop using the system altogether and that's when you start having
these unofficial shadow systems spring up, developed by someone who read
Access For Dummies in 7 Days, and next thing you know you've got 250,000
credit card numbers posted on pastebin.

~~~
bdunbar
_that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up_

Exactly what happened to me today.

An engineer [1] opened up a ticket because some java code he was developing to
insert attachments to our BOM system was returning funny errors.

Which is fine except he'd somehow gotten credentials for my production system
and was testing his code against live bits.

Hooray for initiative, but good lord, fella: how would you feel if I ran out
on the floor and started testing new widgets on equipment we're building for
customers?

[1] Not software but electrical.

------
skrebbel
With these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they
included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody
from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality,
stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for
about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used
to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer,
Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations.
The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well.

Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and
you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.

~~~
rbanffy
You seem to neglect the fact Office users routinely experience problems with
their own documents and programs. Who never had a Word document that, after
some heavy editing, refused to load? I have, many times, since the first
version of Word for Windows. I've abandoned Office between 2002 and 2008 and,
to my surprise, I still had those problems with Word, Project and Outlook
(when I had to clean PST files more than once).

At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own
server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The
usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office
format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.

~~~
excerionsforte
When speaking from your experience its easy to say 'many' users have had
problems, just like how I can say I've never had a problem with a word
document therefore 'many' users have never had a problem with a word document.
:) Not sure what kind of editing you do. haha

~~~
Retric
In 2008 I was creating a lot of PowerPoint presentations with embedded Excel
spreed sheets, and either PowerPoint or Excel crashed on average about every 2
hours. Everyone else in the office had the same problem so it was a huge
productivity black hole.

It's not that you could not get it to work, just there was a vary small 'happy
path' and doing just about anything else caused something to crash. EX: Open
Excel, if Excel is not opened PowerPoint will crash when you try and edit one
of these slides.

PS: I suggested just using images and attaching the originals, but the client
wanted to be able to resize things / change the graphs titles etc.

~~~
excerionsforte
Hmm, i don't use many images for Microsoft Word. It's unfortunate that you had
problems with it. Word crashing for me is very very rare, but most of what I
do is typing and little bits of graphic art, but I think Office has gotten
better lately. Just contact that Splines guy with your issues if they still
persist.

------
vibrunazo
On a parallel anecdote. Installing Ubuntu on my parents PC sure did reduce the
amount of assistance they needed from me with crashes and malware. I'd
recommend it to anyone who needs to spend some time helping non-tech friends
with computer problems :)

~~~
ajuc
My parents use my old PC with Athlon 2000 and 512 MB RAM, I've instaled last
Kubuntu with KDE 3.5 a few years ago, and never needed to touch it since then
:)

The only problem so far is - once a year they need to use free windows-only
application, that doesn't run in WINE, to calculate taxes. They just go to
neighborns for a few hours.

My sister also has Kubuntu on her laptop, but she knows how to update it, so I
don't know which version she runs now :)

If your relatives only use computer to browse web and write simple documents -
linux requires less maintanance. At least that's my experience.

~~~
ttt_
Interestingly, as more government entities adopt linux and foss in general,
they have a lot more incentive to provide support for that. So maybe in a
couple years these government-issued software will target linux distros.

~~~
ajuc
In this case this isn't government-issued software. It's just some free(as in
beer) software attached to law newspaper. They attach it each year with
updated forms and formulas to calculate tax.

------
fleitz
They moved from Windows _NT_ to Linux in _2006_. No wonder it reduced
complaints. I'd be far more interested in a migration from Win 7 or Win XP to
Linux.

~~~
ccozan
I think the main reason was independence from vendors - since they were based
on NT and Microsoft just pulled the support - ouch!, not necessarily nicety or
features of a desktop. The whole infrastructure was changed and not just some
frontend.

~~~
eropple
Microsoft didn't "just pull support" from NT. The lifecycle was pretty well
defined.

~~~
Xylakant
"Pulled support" may be a bit hyperbolic, still, microsofts announcement to
EOL Windows NT was a major point in the decision making. There's an
interesting detailed document here
[http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-
inde...](http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-independence-
limux-project-munich) that talks about this and other aspects of the Limux
project.

> Until 2003, the city was using Microsoft Windows NT 4 across the board, and
> was by and large satisfied. When Microsoft decided to end the support for
> this operating system, this meant that hardware and important procedures
> would eventually stop working. “It was from this experience of being totally
> at the mercy of an external party that we wanted to take the road to more
> independence”, Schießl (ed. the deputy project manager) says.

So having seen the effect of a vendor lock-in, the conscious decision was made
to move to an environment where vendor lock-in can be avoided. It may take
considerable effort to support a linux distribution after its official EOL but
it certainly can be done - unlike any other closed-source OS.

------
tzs
Have they actually saved anything when you take into account nearly a decade
(so far) spent on doing this migration?

The Munich migration is pretty much the canonical example of how to botch a
Linux migration.

~~~
Xylakant
The original document has the hard facts: Until 2011 they spent 11.7 Mio Euros
on the migration and another 2.08 Mio Euros on workflow optimizations that
they tackled at the same time. The calculated cost for a migration of the
Windows NT environment to a newer windows version including support and the
same workflow optimizations are at 15.52 Mio euros. That's a saving of 1.74
Mio Euros or roughly 11.2%. This is taking into account that most migration
costs now have been paid, and savings will subsequently will rise. They also
have anecdotical evidence that error rates and ongoing support costs have
dropped. It's certainly anything but a canonical example for a botched
project.

~~~
DrStalker
That's a saving of 11.2% comparing an actual cost to an estimated cost; if the
estimated cost blew out (which seems to happen a lot in migrations) then the
savings could be even bigger.

------
keithpeter
Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and have been a bystander in medium sized IT
projects.

Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser
based business applications over the next few years?

If so, will that make it easier to switch the _client_ device without major
change in the central plumbing?

~~~
bdunbar
_Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser
based business applications over the next few years?_

Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat
/ skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few
years now.

I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people ( _cough_ management*) seem
to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of
web servers in the enterprise.

On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server,
which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let
me tell you. I don't miss it at all.

------
darklajid
Maybe interesting as well: Dave Richards is aggregated on planet.gnome.org
with his work blog [1] about running the infrastructure of the city of Largo,
Florida [2] (granted, far from the size of Munich). Time frame seems similar
(since 2006) and his blog contains quite a bit of technical information about
the challenges of running a city wide thin client network and the custom
software they create for their users.

Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a
single machine at any given time as well..

1: <http://davelargo.blogspot.com/>

2: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida>

------
icebraining
The article says it's based on Ubuntu, but the LiMux page linked by it says
it's based on Debian (Sarge, no less, which is ancient nowadays).

~~~
Argorak
Since LiMux 3, its Ubuntu.

[https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/fi...](https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/files/DS2011_LiMux_Desktop_Retrospective_2011-08-08.pdf)

They are now on 10.04.

~~~
keithpeter
Should be fun when they upgrade to 12.04. And I say that as one who quite
likes Unity

~~~
Argorak
Its not a standard Ubuntu. For example, they use KDE 3 :).

~~~
keithpeter
Well, they'll have to change that for 12.04 unless they compile their own!

~~~
Xylakant
Well, they do have an IT department with staff competent enough to make a
linux migration. I guess they do have an appropriate rollout management to
compile and deploy KDE without much hassle. I wouldn't worry about that.

~~~
keithpeter
I'm sure they do, but isn't KDE 3.5 obsolete? They would have to take on the
maintenance and security updates themselves...

------
FreshCode
It would be interesting to measure the number of complaints that were based on
experimentation due to users' familiarity with Windows. Since the LiMux
environment is probably more restrictive, is it possible some folks just gave
up on some features, e.g. "How do I attach my Excel doc to an email?" because
there is no Excel, for example. It's great that they are saving the tax-payer
, though.

------
duncans
For counter arguments there's some fascinating stuff at
<http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/> although it hasn't been updated for a
while, so maybe they've finally succeeded?

~~~
mattbriggs
Yeah, if you read that site you'll see that the Munich switch was really
mismanaged and underestimated. This press release sounds more like pr spin
then anything, since they we supposed to be done a very long time ago

~~~
flomo
My understanding is that Munich had a lot of issues which were orthogonal to
Linux - decentralized support, lack of inventory, lack of standards. Of
course, it didn't help that the original proponents were of an 'ideological'
bent and perhaps bit off more than they could chew.

Either way, a 9 year IT project is really dismal.

~~~
Xylakant
There's some misunderstanding here. The migration did not take 9 years. The
project itself started in 2003 but was put on hold in 2004 or 2005 due to the
legal worries surrounding Linux and software patents. It was resumed after
some decision of the European high court. Still, the first years up to 2006
were spent on evaluation and planning and political board games.

Measuring the success of an IT project in years is wrong in any case. Success
is defined in meeting your goals at the required time. Munich is a little late
and they have had their own share of issues and roadblocks, but all in all
they met their goals. Considering that this was the first large scale
migration of a city administration in germany, that's not dismal.

~~~
flomo
In 2003, Munich publicly gave the finger to Steve Ballmer himself and declared
they were moving to Linux. If they really needed 3 years to think about it,
perhaps their PR was all wrong, because all eyes were now on them as the Linux
test case.

And perhaps you would work through this sort of multiyear migration plan, but
I certainly wouldn't. From what I can tell the project was driven by feel-
goodisms and not at all properly scoped.

~~~
Xylakant
The original decision was made in 2003, however if you know how german
administrations work its not surprising that things took another year until
the final go was given. This is in no way an uncommon time if you're dealing
with any (german) administration - vendors need to be selected by a certain
prescribed process, then vetted, contracts need to be made and approved. Then
came legal issues which took more than a year to resolve. So all in all I'm
not much surprised by the timeframe.

Added to that is the fact that the migration happened department by department
in multiple steps, one done, next started. So yes, it's a multiyear plan and I
do agree, I would not have planned and gone through that plan but calling it a
failure because someone actually had the guts and vision and pulled it off is
a bit far fetched.

------
kishorgurtu
Linux? Seriously. A PDP-11 with ed is more than enough. Linux is overkill.

------
rodolphoarruda
"[...] €2.08 million (£1.73 million) for optimisation and test management that
ended up on the balance of the LiMux project [...]"

Does anyone know details of this? Any ideas on what type of "optimisation" was
done?

~~~
ccozan
Lived in Munich for a good while so I know some of it. Most of the
optimization and test went on working with documents. They had a lot of
excel/doc stuff which was programmed in VB so they had to migrate, reproduce
and test them in OpenOffice ( well, now LibreOffice ). Rest went in
intregration and desktop.

I recommend reading this:
[http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-
inde...](http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-independence-
limux-project-munich)

------
desireco42
Replacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far
seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu
number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact
on their work, they would get different results. I was thinking and Google
Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is
just another provider ie. you don't get open source.

I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome
news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot
of negativity pushed under the rug here.

------
pingswept
The subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70
to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the
article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70
to 46, not 4.

(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining
here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)

~~~
click170
Looks like a very-likely spelling mistake, someone probably just forgot to
type the 6.

------
azth
They should have called it Munix :P

------
tbsdy
I love Linux myself, and I have no doubt that they've saved money, but the
following makes me a little concerned about how they are going about Service
Management:

"Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the
help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of
several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are
problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning."

My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of
appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident
Management setups would allow them to perform _basic_ analysis of the incident
data to work out where there issues are coming from.

I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for
certain where the city's problems are coming from :(

~~~
Xylakant
I'm speculating a little here, but there might be legal restrictions keeping
them from reaching that goal. The basic argument is that any tool that may be
used to track work performance (such as a tool tracking user errors) may be
abused to control the employees work and thus may need union approval. I've
run into this issue multiple times when doing work for government or
government-like institutions in germany, once in pretty much the same
constellation: A tool for defect tracking in IT was shot down because the
union was afraid that it might be used to single out low-performing employees
by tracking their computer problems. (sounds silly, I agree, but we're talking
germany and we do have our own standards of sillyness.)

------
gitarr
It seems to me that some Microsoft (and maybe Apple) marketing people are hard
at work at every discussion about this topic, even here.

