According to the former major, bill gates went all the way there and asked for a private meeting. Although at the time he was officially no longer actively involved with microsoft.
There was, but not from Microsoft. It was the employees who were not happy with the new systems.
Employees do not participate in the procurement process. It boils down to the requirements and how does it affect possible bidders. Most of the requirements can be easily met with OSS, there were prob others plus the drop of the price from MS
This shows total disregard for the reality of the workplace. You can't shove 30,000 linux PCs onto boomer government workers and expect things to work like magic. It was a catastrophe. Especially since they no longer had the same level of tech support. The majority of them weren't even fully onboarded by the time they switched back to Windows.