US military nails 'best ever' Microsoft deal, brags size does matter US Department of Defense personnel will get their hands on Microsoft’s latest software in a deal officials claim is their best yet from Redmond. The government department has signed a three-year enterprise licence agreement with Microsoft worth $617m, giving its two-million-plus civilian and military staff access to Windows 8 …
To my eternal shame I was involved in deploying a Windows "solution" to navy submarines. It was a bloody nightmare - sysytem hangs, blue screens, phantom reboots, etc... The application was crap as well, thankfully I had nothing to do with that.
Luckily it was only used for inventory control and was quickly shot out of the torpedo tubes :-)
Windows has been running ships for quite a while now
I rather like that - it is following the same path as SCADA.
Isolated environment, install COTS because someone sells this as the most cost effective option and suddenly they get hooked up to a decent network because they have to work in a collaborative context.
And what happened next with SCADA? Yup.
I'd call it Worries for Warships..
Have you tried using LibreOffice having moved from MS Office? Especially in an environment where lots of others still use MS Office?
My department (all 8 of us) moved over to it for a couple of weeks (we were about to "upgrade" from MSOffice 2003 to 2007 and decided to go for the free option) and we found we'd have to 'touch up' our documents on an MS-Office machine to make sure they looked right. There were useful features missing left, right and centre, our Macros didn't work- if we were just turning out documents that could be PDF-ed (so we know they'll always look right) it may have sufficed, but it just was not useable. In the end it cost more in lost productivity than just buying 'proper' Office. 2007 came with it's own set of challenges, but at least everything /worked/.
Now scale that up to 2,000,000 users and 15 years of custom ways of doing things. Moving to LibreOffice would be phenomenally expensive.
I still use it at home, though.
we found we'd have to 'touch up' our documents on an MS-Office machine to make sure they looked right
I must admit I admire the genius of Microsoft to make people care a lot more about formatting than content, which also explains the very existence and (ab)use of Powerpoint.
Your metrics don't add up, though. Costs don't go up linearly - if you want to do a project like that you first examine needs, hire temp skills so you can run a feasibility pilot and work out where your problems lie.
At that point you can decide to acquire the required skill sets through staffing or training and plan a migration. Your higher costs are offset by license saving in Y1, with no repeat costs in Y2 (so your saving increases year on year), and your efficiency increases as skillsets deepen. In addition, because you actually have a UI which doesn't change every other week you also no longer have staff retraining issues to hang on to the productivity you have achieved. The only issue is that you'll have to spend some money on ODF to OOXML conversion - that team needs support in many ways because MS OOXML isn't as Open a standard as MS pretends it to be..
I helped an organisation do exactly that, successfully on more than one occasion. The trick is having a careful plan and giving it more than 2 weeks.
Our plan was to keep the existing Office software on the PC's for the time being, to open those legacy documents created on it but use LibreOffice to create all new documents and to open them. Most users were very happy with the arrangement and the company reduced it's IT spending over the next two years (and onwards). This paved the way to upgrade most of the departments to Linux two years later. Finance wouldn't budge because the crap software provided by banks for integrating with them, was only designed for windows.
The two companies I'm thinking of no longer need to buy antivirus products or software licenses. They also have reduced their desktop support staff, as no viruses to remove and operating systems simply don't need to be reloaded. The staff are more productive too. There is no rebooting of PC's in the middle of the working day anymore or waiting while updates are applied.
The support is done remotely now and therefore can be achieved on demand as no travelling required.
Since then, they have been spending their I.T. budget on nicer hardware, both out back and on the desktop, making the whole thing even more reliable. Best decision they ever made.
I use Linux at home and nothing could ever persuade me to go back to Windows (I recommend Ubuntu with KDE desktop).
If small organisations can plan this kind of migration, get it right, save money and increase productivity, why can't the US DOD?
Now scale that up to 2,000,000 users and 15 years of custom ways of doing things. Moving to LibreOffice would be phenomenally expensive.
It's the 15 years of custom ways that have led to the expense, though. That is where companies should be looking. Most office documents could be very simple, but are over-complicated by using proprietary features "because they are available".
I remember getting a PowerPoint file once that consisted of one line of text on one page (standard font and colour. No doubt this was the only way the author knew how to send a one-line attachment. Then there is the number of Excel files I've had just so someone can send a 3x3 "table" when it could all have been entered as raw text in the message.
Businesses dig their own holes, and once started they have a shovel in their hands, so reckon that the only thing to do is keep digging...
I work for the US Navy, and we have alot of workstations running Red Hat. The only time I touch Windows at work is to read my email.
.. for which there are also plenty alternatives, but it suggests some Talibandit managed to convince your betters to suffer Exchange instead of a decent groupware package.
I've seen the kind of stage shows MS puts up for military, so I'm not surprised. If they spent 25% of that effort improving the actual product they wouldn't have problems at all, but as far as I can tell, conning people into buying stuff is about the only thing they were genuinely good at.
This announcement sounds suspiciously like one my relatives made after bagging a load of 'discount' watches - - from a cruise they'd been on - that started running slow after a week.
RRP $99, but special to cruise patrons: $20. If the fact they can't be bought anywhere else but on cruises at $20, and have some rich-sounding but obscure brand name doesn't raise alarm bells I don't know what does!
A lot of higher up government officials have relations with large contracting companies like Northrup Grumman and Halliburton, which in turn have financial relations with Microsoft, so by choosing Microsoft they are just making share prices raise which is good for the whole "club". It's really that simple.
Until FOSS can pay out, hardly any want to pay in.
So Microsoft has succeeded in baiting the DOD into expanding it's use of their software which will have to be re-licensed after 3yrs? Then what, Microsoft comes back and enjoys hitting them with huge licensing fees for all the extra computers and devices now running more software than ever? Looks to me like the DOD is out to lunch on basic strategy. I wouldn't brag like they did if I was the DOD, they just got embarrassingly taken advantage of.
That's a crap deal and a waste of taxes. Suddenly announcing that you're upgrading Windows sounds like what happens when an IT department is caught stealing it. The settlement can be paying to upgrade every single x86 machine to a new licensed copy of the full MS software suite, whether it runs Windows or not.
"...Announcing the agreement, the department - the world’s largest employer ..."
This side of the pond, the BBC regularly tells us that the NHS is second only to the PLA [Chinese Army] in terms of the world's biggest employers. Who are these DoD upstarts? ...and what is the truth?
These are probably two different metrics? Total employees != bums @ terminals != gross budget. They're using statistics, so they could mean anything! Presumably a greater proportion of NHS employees have better things to do than sit at their new Win 8 machine and fiddle with their Facebook profile so NHS could well be "smaller" in the general context of the article... I doubt that's anything to do with whatever bizarre manner they've spun this little statoid for this little propaganda belch though.
Being Yanks, my bet's on this particular "largest" being "grossest budget" ;o)
DoD: Largest employer on the planet
Microsoft: Largest software company on the planet
United States economy: WIN WIN
DoD IT jobs: WIN WIN
No one cares about the headline deal value. You have to be pretty naive to believe this is just another standard enterprise deal. The finer details will never become public. DoD will get special treatment.
As for the "my OS is better than your OS" crap; only geeks could give a crap. Get 90% of the business world onto a Linux and malware developers will shift focus. They are a tenacious lot, they will rapidly find security holes in Linux apps too.
United States economy: WIN WIN
Reality check of your reality check: Microsoft ships profits abroad.
As for the better/worse: let's just hope none of this new software is deployed anywhere near theatre. Would you want to be in a war on Patch Tuesday?
There is better software out there, but the most likely users are people that know the Microsoft brand. There is no goodness in trying to retrain people when the turnover rate is high and likely to get higher with downsizing.
The folks that have to mind all the systems will more than likely use whatever they like to get the job(s) done, but for the unwashed masses, Windows is still good enough.
Linux is still alive and well in the military thankfully (Former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff is a part of Red Hat), but it's just not quite ready for everyone yet.
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