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Comment by edwinnathaniel | Hacker News Reader

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.....

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> 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)

Most of our clients are using SharePoint and while I'm not working in SP-related projects, I have not heard complains from them regarding downtimes or data loss so far. In fact, they're all happy using SharePoint.

I can't comment on that particular issue.

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)

edwinnathaniel:

You're absolutely right about Microsoft Sharepoint (and InfoPath): it makes switching away from Windows much more painful and costly. FWIW, I have no doubt there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft thinking 24 hours a day about how to increase switching barriers for customers.

As to Microsoft's licensing discounts in key markets, they're not new. Ballmer traveled personally to meet with Munich's mayor and reportedly offered similarly crazy discounts to prevent them from switching to Linux. (See http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsofts-ballmer-figh... and http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.heise.de/... for some details.)

Regardless, the important question (for budget-strapped cities and governments) remains the same: can they save a lot of money by switching to desktop Linux? If the savings claimed by Munich are accurate, the answer is a resounding yes.

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

That makes plenty of a sense. If you force people to use Microsoft products while they're young they are much less liable to switch to another platform while they're older. They're use to their tools and people are lazy. So heavily subsidizing educational uses of software makes plenty of sense.

God forbid we ever lived in a hacker culture where kids in K-12 were forced to learn how to code and actually understand how computers worked as part of the curriculum, then Microsoft would be in real trouble.

"Forcing kids to learn how to code" is a sure way to make them hate coding. But I'm sure you meant "encouraged" instead of "forced".

Just like forcing them to learn how to read is a sure way to make them hate reading? Forcing them to learn history is a sure way to make them hate history?

Would forcing them to learn how to drive be a sure way to make them hate driving?

Same with the MSDNAA project. As a student i was able to download almost every software from MS for free (even Enterprise versions, etc.). Since many people start to learn coding in university, you catch them with Visual Studio, perfect timing..

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

If I recall correctly, according to the director of IT of a large, local non-profit, they get access to the full suite of enterprise Microsoft products for something on the range of $1000 per year.

At that price point, saying 'open source can save you money' is meaningless, because they have already made investments in Microsoft IT expertise.

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