No, it didn't "just move". Microsoft's German HQ had been in Munich-Unterschleissheim ( for over three decades. What happened recently was that the company moved those offices into a more central location in Munich (Schwabing), near to the two major universities in the city.
This was an organisational, not a technology failure. Fixating on "Microsoft versus Linux" isn't just juvenile, it's also counter-productive. It won't help address the reasons why this project became such a mess.
And meanwhile, lots of other "serious" organisations have made the same transition that Munich failed to; the French Gendarmerie for instance now uses a Linux-based LibreOffice-based workflow for all its internal IT.
If there's one easy lesson from this, it should be that Linux's proponents really need to stop pitching Linux as a "cost-saving" alternative to proprietary software: this gives the customer the wrong mindset from the get-go. In truth, the software licences are never the big line items in a business process improvement project.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
