
Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m - rbanffy
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
======
tw04
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 costs are a very, very real cost.

~~~
merb
Costs are as follow:

    
    
        - 14   Mio € for personal costs
        - 24   Mio € for consulting (not sure why that is that high?!)
        - 13,4 Mio € for it@M services (support, hardware installation, etc it@M is the it company that manages the project)
        -  4,8 Mio € for HARDWARE
        - 29,9 Mio € for Licenses (Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software delivery, License-, Print-, and Profile Management, identity management and extension of the virtualisation environment)
    

(to be fair the pdf quotes that a big cost will be the investment into
additional virtualisation, probably licenses)

Source: [https://www.ris-
muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4740...](https://www.ris-
muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4740966.pdf)

Somebody read over the 'and' (edit:) and to be fair it's a wierd way of
expressing something that is so important in german. probably an intention.

~~~
mistermann
I've worked in industry long enough to suspect that there's an excellent
chance that any quoted numbers are so adjusted by whoever is most politically
powerful that my intuition is to just shrug my shoulders and move on to the
next article. Dishonesty is so prevalent in so many "news" articles today a
person should just read things and have a little chuckle before going about
their day.

------
mtgx
Meanwhile:

[https://www.itworld.com/article/2716115/operating-
systems/sw...](https://www.itworld.com/article/2716115/operating-
systems/switching-to-linux-saves-munich-over--11-million.html)

I'm sure Munich council's decision to switch back to Windows, despite all the
costs and long-term lock-in, had nothing to do with this totally random HQ-
building in Munich:

[https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-
new-h...](https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-
headquarters/)

~~~
a254613e
If MS built their HQ in Munich because of that then it's an absolutely amazing
deal for Munich.

Just the tax on salaries from those 1900 people working there will pay off the
costs of switching to Windows in a very short time.

And as a nice bonus I'm sure that 28% of users that "have severe issues
related to software, which could be solved by migrating these users to Windows
and MS Office."[0] will also be happy.

[0]:
[https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statemen...](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statement-
by-the-document-foundation-about-the-upcoming-discussion-at-the-city-of-
munich-to-step-back-to-windows-and-ms-office/)

~~~
himlion
Most of that tax money would not go to the city level government though.

~~~
germanier
15% of tax revenue ends up at the municipality to be exact.

------
Sylos
> ...will also reduce costs by not having to run a Windows and LiMux client
> side-by-side.

Mind that this means "reduce costs in comparison to moving to another non-
Windows OS". They still do not have a cost calculation that would promise
long-term savings and I'd call it unlikely at least that there will be
savings, as the previous city mayor reported huge savings after the migration
to LiMux.

------
upofadown
The article didn't mention what the yearly Windows licensing costs would be
after the transition. I remember that the elimination of such costs was an
argument for the transition in the first place.

------
blub
I wonder how they plan to disable the spyware? Even the enterprise edition
doesn't allow turning everything off.

My employer is still rocking Windows 7 for this reason.

At one point we trialed Windows Phone, the guide was a series of embarassing
turn this feature off, turn that frature off to try to limit the amount of
data being syphoned. Now we use iPhones.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Win10 LTSB is free of the crapware.

~~~
Karunamon
Ostensibly. Given the nigh-malware-like tactics that W10 uses to work around
those who try to disable some of that behavior, I'd be quite surprised if it
was completely clean.

And if that fails, it's till s a massive blob of closed source proprietary
code at the end of the day. Your single option is to trust Microsoft.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
> I'd be quite surprised if it was completely clean.

I understood that LTSB was intended specifically for semi-critical/continous
usage applications, like airport kiosks and the like.

To me, it would seem a bit irresposible to pollute LTSB with telemetry and
cruft, when Microsoft knows full well that businesses bought that distribution
for that specific guarantee.

------
guilhas
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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
angry_octet
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.

------
webreac
If they want to reduce costs, they should fight against the 20% still running
windows. Etherogeneity is a huge liability.

------
peterisza
I think it should all be web based with some random thin clients.

~~~
Sylos
That is what they're wanting to move to. They asked the Microsoft partner
Accenture, who could sell a lot of Windows clients here, to evaluate their IT
situation and not even they dared to throw their reputation away and somehow
suggest that Windows is a necessity. They also just suggested a thin-client
architecture.

------
dingo_bat
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.

~~~
rbanffy
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.

~~~
stinky613
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML)

~~~
vertex-four
IIRC, it is essentially impossible to correctly implement parts of OOXML
without reverse-engineering the Office suite. The standard does not provide
enough information.

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

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
That's how it works in Desktop Linux. The system is such a hodgepodge of
interconnected pieces, each with their own slight variations in operation,
configuration, and quirks, that once you finally put something together that
works to your tastes you pretty much have to create your own distribution to
keep it that way.

~~~
danieldk
...or you can just contract Red Hat or SUSE (which used to be a German
company) to standardize on RHEL/SLED plus some customizations. They would be a
pretty big customer with a good perspective to add other municipalities and
branches of government in the case of success.

------
tempodox
Astonishing, how politicians always manage to be such efficient disgust
generators.

OTOH, has nobody written an Atom-based Windows emulator yet that runs in a
Docker container?

------
Cuuugi
This seems semi-reasonable over 29000 systems.

The reality is enterprise support for linux systems is the one variable i
don't really see discussed here. This is Microsoft's bread and butter for a
reason. Organizations prefer an easy upfront cost rather than complex, support
intensive solutions.

~~~
rkangel
I'm not sure the level of support needed for Windows systems is much different
to that of Linux. There will be an associated cost in both cases.

~~~
mijoharas
Also, I'd argue that IT support for linux is much easier to provide (and
therefore, _should_ be cheaper, I can't say whether it is or not).

~~~
coliveira
I think that the main problem when it comes to Linux support is that people
who really understand Linux/UNIX have an easier time finding better paying
positions. Lower paid IT workers tend to hang around the MS ecosystem. This
shows up in the cost of maintenance for Linux solutions.

~~~
cjalmeida
I think so. Hiring half decent Linux support staff would be a nightmare.

Window support staff are cheap and abundant. Not to mention the off the shelf
outsourcing providers. IT in most large organizations already happens in
India.

Love Linux and use it as my main desktop. Supporting corporate wide? Big no.

~~~
camus2
AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux administration of Munich
municipality so recruiting admins was not the issue.

~~~
e12e
It's funny, I read: "AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux
administration of Munich municipality" as confirmation that hiring half-
competent team of Linux admins is difficult. But I confess to being biased to
the corners of Accenture that I've been previously exposed to...

------
jenscow
> ... a full rollout of Microsoft Office 2016 ... one report suggesting the
> combined cost with the Windows migration could be higher than €100m.

Yikes!

Wasn't the the migration _away from_ Windows something like €30m?

------
skc
It's not about money. If it cost twice that to move to Macs I think people
would be celebrating.

------
toyg
_> Today the CSU political party, which has a long track record of opposition
to LiMux, is also part of the ruling coalition in Munich. It was this
coalition of CSU and SPD politicians that put forward the proposals to switch
back to Windows 10 earlier this year._

How do you say "pork" in German?

~~~
Y_Y
Schweinefleisch

~~~
oblio
I think he was referring to this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel)

~~~
abrowne
So _Kirchturmpolitik_ (based on Wikipedia's linked German article).

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

------
adrianlmm
And the productivity will increase 1000%, worth it.

