Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this is controversial at all, or if more govts are sticking with MS out of plain old inertia.

MS has a place. Look at the requirements, and if MS is the 'best', use them. But... the 'best' definition needs to be clear at all levels, and understood by everyone involved.

My argument for migrating towards more Linux/opensourceness would be one of 'keep the money local'. Especially in the early stages of a migration, there may in fact be a short term increase in spending, to find local talent to train and reprogram systems. After the initial transition, the need for fewer license renewals can be substantial.

Assuming there wasn't 100% reduction in licensing costs. Let's say there was a 60% reduction in licensing costs, but in reality that became only 70% because of increased training, customization and programming costs. You've saved 30% but also kept more money flowing in the UK economy.

At some point, stuff need to be paid for. You can choose to hire local consultants and companies who use MS tools, meaning you're paying for local talent and paying license fees over to an US-based company. Or you can pay local talent to use free technology.

Bottom line: You have to pay talent/labor, but you may have more money in the budget to pay more local people to get more done after migrating to free technologies.

I'm skeptical of "keep the money local" and "create local jobs" arguments. They sound good, but rarely end up being good economics.

Beware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism

In my mind, the two most important things to consider are:

1) How will worker productivity be affected by the transition? Retraining and relearning can be extremely expensive, especially for information workers who are set in their ways. Not to mention the cost of migrating all a company's documents, scripts, programs, assets, etc. over to the new formats.

2) How is worker productivity affected in the long run? OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average information worker. The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.

In the grand scheme of things, software is pretty cheap. Wasted man-hours are very expensive. I haven't seen evidence that these transitions to open source actually save money.

> How will worker productivity be affected by the transition?

It's easy to run a pilot and check. From previous experiences, it drops a little in the beginning, but training smooths the transition. With increased decision freedom due to removed vendor lock-in, governments can both choose the best tool for a given job (even if it's incompatible with, say, MS SQL Server) or develop the missing functionality (because they have access to source code). And governments can cooperate over these developments across regional or national borders. Reduced licensing cost is just the beginning.

> especially for information workers who are set in their ways

In other words, who can't learn another IDE beyond Visual Studio and other language beyond VB. Oh! Wait! They have to learn a new Visual Studio every couple years. And they had to learn VB.Net (or C#, or managed C++). They already do relearn lots of stuff.

And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him.

> OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average information worker

Come on... How many people within Microsoft really stress Words feature-set? 1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and Visicalc. Also, it's not like Office 2003 users weren't completely lost when upgraded to 2007 and more so on 2010. The GDP of a decent-sized country was lost on menu repositioning over Office's history.

> The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.

Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?

Oh! Wait! They have to learn a new Visual Studio every couple years. And they had to learn VB.Net (or C#, or managed C++).

Most information workers are not developers and have never heard of the above technology. Keep in mind that developers are more receptive to change than most computer workers, which is part of the reason MSFT evolves dev technology more rapidly.

They already do relearn lots of stuff.

Switching to the new version of Windows/Office is not the same as switching to Linux/OpenOffice. To keep things in perspective, the switch to the Ribbon was the biggest change to Office in many releases. Most releases (e.g. Office 2010) require little relearning.

And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him.

Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?

It isn't black and white like that. This isn't about not being willing to learn or not being able to learn new things. Many computer workers -- lawyers, managers, schoolteachers, administrative assistants, my parents -- hate having to learn new technology. They'll learn eventually, but it might be slow and costly, and might not result in any productivity boost in the end.

Come on...How many people within Microsoft really stress Words feature-set? 1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and Visicalc.

It's not about feature set. It's about familiarity, muscle memory, ease of use, efficiency, stability, performance, interoperability, accessibility, backwards compatibility, ubiquity (Office is installed on most PCs), documentation, supportability, and visual polish.

Alternate response: why are so few organizations switching to WordStar & Visicalc?

just because it's a headline doesn't make it a controversy.

I have seen what my government (not UK) needs in terms of IT infrastructure and there isn't anything microsoft specific that is being exploited to any degree. Most IT related jobs are outsourced to contract workers and the big money play would actually come from migration costs.

also, some government branches might be running custom software, which would either need to re-written or, quite frankly, trashed -_-.

I wasn't meaning it was specifically controversial in this case - poorly worded on my part. I remember when these ideas were first gaining steam years ago in various govts (linux people always liked to point to any 'wins'). I guess I was just wondering if it's primarily inertia that still keeps people from basically even trying pilots to determine cost savings or other benefits.

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