Minnesota Moving To Microsoft's Cloud 345
An anonymous reader writes "The State of Minnesota is apparently the first state to move into the cloud, agreeing on a deal to have their messaging and collaboration services delivered through Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite. The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?"
Worthless summary (Score:1, Insightful)
TFA:
How could switching to an entirely incompatible platform have saved taxpayers millions?
That's Life (Score:1, Insightful)
People are used to microsoft. Its a recognised brand name - irrelevant of how good/bad it is.
If a leader decides that their underlings will use this 'new-fangled' leenux instead of what everyone else always uses, people get scared of the change and react badly to it.
Even trying to explain to my sister why she should give Ubuntu a try was a problem for me, let alone trying to get a large group of (non-techy) people to make the switch.
Then once the smallest problem crops up, people would go "Why did you switch to such a rubbish system? We should have gone Microsoft" - again irrelevant of the change in problem amount.
Re:That's Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Use MS software, and your boss will see it as MS's fault when it breaks. Use alternatives, and it'll be your fault. It's the 21st century analogue of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars.
Before I saddle up the war horses, can you provide a citation?
This is a serious allegation; tying arrangements are dangerously prosecutable under antitrust laws, as Microsoft should remember.
What do you think, Slashdotters? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota?
Hmmmm... I've studied the data carefully and considered the pros and cons, taking account of the prevailing trends and allowing for all the variables. Based on my analysis I predict that the Slashdot consensus will be that going all Microsoft is not a good move.
Re:Foo (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably less than the cost of being locked into no-shop clauses in an MS agreement.
Such a non-compete clause is most likely an anti-trust violation if TFS is correct.
I smell a lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad move for Minnesota (Score:5, Insightful)
The article comments that Minnesota is switching over to something businesses have found great success in for years. As someone that has to use BPOS at work I must say the system is incredibly unreliable. We have had email simply disappear into a void. The service is slow. It frequently stops working for hours at a time. We have had other email delivered hours after it was sent.
We had to disable rather important functionality in order to migrate over to BPOS as we are not allowed to customize anything. Now we have users doing things by hand which used to be automated.
Before we switched over to BPOS I considered email as trustworthy and reliable as most utilities. My employer has structured the company with the assumption that email will be a reliable communications medium. With BPOS in place it is a burden on our organization.
Re:I smell a lawsuit (Score:1, Insightful)
"...does this mean I have to now own proprietary applications to view public documents?"
the only valid point so far in this thread.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Although you're probably an AC Microsoft shill, there's precedent that says that open source systems fail-- see Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich. That said, Minnesota takes a huge chance on untested infrastructure, and indeed binds themselves to Microsoft's hosted products-- when many others might do the job. Let's see how the TCO for taxpayers actually amount to in five years.
Ugh, I unfortunately am a Minnesotan. (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess this news should have floored me but it doesn't. We have an entrenched administration that has the mantra "No new taxes" which has a nice sounding ring to it but the result has been less pretty (like a major interstate bridge that just decided to fall into the Mississippi river). I was drivng down the freeway today and the truck was bouncing around so badly I had to slow down (and I was not speeding).
How does all this relate to moving to the Microsoft cloud? I am sure the state is getting a low cost price to get them in the door. Once hooked the price will go up and it will need to be paid and some other service will be asked to do more with less. Maybe the old lady in the nursing home will have to cut back on someting like drugs or catheters. Maybe a school will have to put off buying science textbooks (for the tenth year in a row).
Re:Minnesota Values... (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me? Please do not relate any of Minnesota's Values to Michelle Bachmann. She is the worst kind of politician who has no intelligence what-so-ever. She continues to be elected by an extremely gerrymandered district that has had no real competition on the right and wouldn't elect someone from the left unless literally directly paid to do so. Minnesota aside, any words that come from her mouth have a tendency to be as hollow as her head and can not be trusted. She is an agitator and a crowd pleaser who we can only hope will somehow manage to lose an election so she can go wallow with her tea party friends somewhere outside of our state. She may make her direct electors proud but the rest (majority) of the state laughs at them and are embarrassed to be represented by her.
Re:Foo (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably because even if you used Microsoft software in the past, you had to change formats for their own software. Remember when 2007 couldn't open 2003, until all the backlash, then they finally decided to introduce translation. A shame that a government would be shackled to a company known for their insecure software and their greed. But probably that state has too much money, and taxpayers were requesting to have higher taxes.
Re:That's Life (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't understand Free Software (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that the state of Minnesota already has developed custom software in-house that depends on the Microsoft platform. You migrate to a Microsoft cloud if your existing software is already locked into Microsoft platform. That's only natural. At any rate, the whole cloud computing concept is very simple: let someone who is good at running data center do their job.
You could very well argue that redeveloping the software to base on an open-source platform might be a better plan in the long run, and I would tend to agree with that. But the redevelopment will surely cost the state some millions of dollars more in the short run.
You also probably don't realize that software costs money to develop. Even when the software is offered to you for free, someone, somewhere is paying for it. That's because someone has to spend time doing something. In order to sustain the livelihood, that person needs to eat, drink, pay rent, and once in a while use medical help. When software gets open sourced, the person is donating his time and effort and has absorbed the cost of writing the software.
And don't forget that free software is not really about the cost. It's about the freedom to learn from the software, to modify the software, and to distribute your modifications.
Re:Foo (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure your so-called point...
Re:Minnesota Values... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is that you, Mr. Ballmer? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Installing the system cleanly in one stretch without rebooting ...
2) Having working hardware without resorting to CDs (so many notebooks don't have CD drives these days) or downloading drivers
3) Playing media in less common formats, such as Matroska for instance, right from the start in a default installation
4) Having a fully working usable system from the start, without having to hunt for applications after you install the operating system
5) A repository of software where you can easily search for the functions you need and install them with a single click of the mouse
6) A "start" menu organized in a functional hierarchy instead of by software vendor
7)
Oh, wait, you only asked for three examples.
Re:What does that mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Never worked at any large organizations have you? The cost of software licenses is trivial compared to the costs in time and lost productivity anytime you introduce a change in the workflow. Doesn't matter if this is switching to a new program, introducing a new program, or even an upgrade from the previous version to a new version. Case in point, we hired a new Sr. developer who had his IDE of choice. Cost: $249. We used an opensource IDE. We're paying him roughly $70 an hour all said and done. How many wasted hours of time learning the "free" opensource IDE does it take to cover the cost of that license? If switching to the "free" opensource IDE costs more than 1 day of productivity, it's cheaper to buy the program. (which we did). This looks like its a change in the background, from a users perspective they'll probably still be using Outlook, it's just the settings are a little different. The end user won't notice anything different in their workflow. They used Outlook before, they'll continue using the same program here.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:2, Insightful)
Lets be clear about this though, the cost of Microsoft licences are a drop in the bucket in any large organizations IS budget. The big money goes towards specialty applications, 'consulting', and support contracts for said software and 'consultants'. I'm speaking with a primary experience in the health care field mind you but as a consultant I am pretty confident it applies elsewhere.
And the bottom line is, even though the OS and much of the productivity applications may be free to use, they are by far not free to implement, free to support, or free to train to use. In health care at least, good luck finding any specialty application suite that would run natively in Linux. The particular application set I'm familiar with (Siemens Soarian, et al) are so Microsoft encumbered as to use not only all Windows Servers on the backend, but ActiveX Webpages as a front end. WHAT.A.NIGHTMARE. Good for business though :D
Also (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft really DOES have good enterprise tools. If you don't know about them all that means is you haven't worked with it in a large enterprise. That is not useless. It makes things easier to manage, which means less support costs. Never underestimate how much personnel can cost. If you save $1 million per year on licenses going open source, but have to hire 20 new support staff costing $70,000 each (remember people cost more than just their base salary, have to account for benefits, taxes, and so on) to support it you've lost money, even if there is no retraining/productivity loss.
I'm not saying that would be the case here, I haven't studied their setup and don't care to, but then neither have the knee-jerk "OSS is cheaper!" folks. Sorry, but it may not be. It is complicated. In any setup you have to study what they have, what they need, what it would take to change, and so on. ALL costs have to be considered. You can't only look at license or hardware costs and ignore staff or training costs.
So just because OSS doesn't have upfront costs doesn't mean it is free.
We've seen that where I work. We do Windows, Solaris, and Linux. It isn't really optional, we do education and research that needs all of them. Fair enough, but let me tell you getting a central system that works with all three has not been easy. It cost a fair bit of money (in the form of Sun Directory Server and IDsync) and a lot of development by our staff. It was worth it, since we need it, but there was real cost, and ongoing cost to support it. On the other hand Active Directory just works. Does what we need right out of the box. In fact the Windows side runs all on the AD, that just syncs to LDAP. Yes, we have to pay for Windows licenses, but there is something to be said for the features that come with it.
I'm quite sure that OSS can work for a large enterprise because there are plenty of examples where it does. However glibly assuming it is easy or costs less is stupid. The needs to the organization have to be assessed, and you have to factor in ALL costs. You may discover that in some situations the answer is it actually costs more. What you save on licenses you lose in other areas.
It's manipulation and using another's reputation (Score:3, Insightful)
They are a cuckoo that has pushed its way into the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mentality without providing the service that gave IBM the reputation.
The reality is such stupid stuffups as not even getting ping right when they had the source coded as a gift, divide by zero errors when they tried to go mission critical, devices that shut down due to leap years and the malware swamp we suffer from today. If you ask ME it's not a good Vista to look at.
I still use their stuff but there is no point pretending that it is the best available.
Re:Foo (Score:2, Insightful)
Talking about the stuff not mentioned. How about the biggest thing of all, now that Minnesota's data is in M$ cloud every company that wants to do business with it and every government department that needs to access it will also be forced into M$ permanent proprietary connections and data never stop paying for cloud.
Basically the whole state will end up bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars for ever, adjusted for inflation because of the short sighted distorted thinking of the current administrators. What will be the biggest lock in to keep it permanent, "Oh my God, what about the cost of converting data, Oh My God what about the cost of retraining, Oh my God what the administration costs", same old same old lock in crap. Hint pay the cost once and the licence fees are gone for ever, as for the administration costs they are much the same excluding endless forced upgrades and the associated data conversions and retraining.
That state has just locked every other company out and grossly ant-competitive contract that should be investigated by the Feds. The cloud is B$, in reality it is just a permanent lock in and a constant source of costs leaving your system permanently vulnerable because you can have no part of it disconnected from the internet. The reality is kept it local, don't connect to the internet unless it absolutely has too, power supply backup (due to absolute necessity to keep functioning serious power supply back up).
Now a single corporation ultimately controls the State of Minnesota, if people don't think so than they have no idea how things can be automated, data changed and added too, forced recipients of advertising, creeping competitor lock outs, proprietary protocol access fees, corporate access to all state communications. It really is crazy stuff to trust all that to a single corporation and grossly inappropriate for any government to do so, whether local, state or federal.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sure, we could save some up-front money to Microsoft"
Of course, you would save 100% of use licences since using open source software you don't pay use licenses *at all*.
"but some of it would still go to Red Hat (all production Linux servers run RHEL, as CentOS is authorized only for test environments)"
Not some money, but some *other* money. Well, if you want support from Microsoft, you still have to pay it apart from use licenses too. Rates from Microsoft and Red Hat regarding support are basically the same, so you are at odds here -and you are still in front since you didn't pay for use licenses.
And then, public government is there to think about overall society benefit, isn't it? Even if now only Red Hat could bring proper advanced support for their products, if they are taking too large a profit margin what do you think that would happen? Support contracts at the State level are not peanuts and everybody is in the position to give proper support on Red Hat. Or any open source program for that matter. And then again, being Red Hat both open source and unix-like, it works lightyears better on integration with other solutions and with lightyears less risk of lock-in. You don't like Red Hat? OK, there's Suse, or Debian, or Ubuntu, or even FreeBSD and you can change to them with only minor transition costs.
Now, who can give advanced support on Windows but Microsoft? Where can you go appart from Microsoft when you don't like Microsoft without incurring large migration costs?
And that's exactly the point: Microsoft's basic strategy is based on lock-in, which being a variant of monopoly we all now what it does to the customers. And it's obvious both from common sense and past experience that it won't be any better tomorrow, so while meaning a large and expensive exercise, the sooner you break Microsoft's lock in, the more money you will be saving long term.
"the admins would have to be retrained or replaced at rates that run higher than the existing ones. "
You mentioned that rates were about 1:1.2 but, what about serviceability? Because if each Unix/Linux guy can bring to the table more than 1:1.2 when compared to Windows ones (and that's usually the case in my experience), you are getting savings *even* at a higher individual hiring costs. And then again, why do you think Unix/Linux guys get better wages? I'll tell you: on one hand because they diserve it (or else no one would hire them at such cost mark) on the other hand because of relative scarcity. Well, what do you think that will happen -and happen *fast*, with regards to scarcity if it's acknowledged that Unix/Linux guys are wanted in big numbers and payed over market average, specially if Windows guys needs start to decline?
MN is run by a no-tax no-government slave (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble Pawlenty, whose Indian name is Chief Tumbling Bridges, does not want to spend a penny, nor help anybody except the 157 million/billionnaires who he caters to. this is not a "big vote" for cloud computing, but he probably thinks by getting rid of infrastructure, he can get rid of more of the state government. it's foxes for the hen house.
Re:Foo (Score:5, Insightful)
You pay for a copy of Windows and you get 10 years of guaranteed patches from the date of release. Not too bad over all.
Obviously you don't sign the invoices for Microsoft products. You don't just pay for a copy of Windows server. You pay for the sever, then for CALS besides the seat licenses for the products that connect to that server. With MSFT you pay and pay and pay. Their prices, their upgrade schedule, their partners.
With RedHat you pay for annual service at the level you want. Or you can go with something like ClearOS and get updates and patches handled for you for less than $250 year or go with CentOS and do it yourself.
You don't get those options with M$. Stop apologizing for greedy corporate fucktards.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:4, Insightful)
"The problem is the vendors you outsource to often JUST DON'T CARE"
There is ALWAYS one thing a manager must take into consideration when outsourcing a service that I haven't seen pointed out almost NEVER.
* The goal of an external provider is always offer as little as it can go with and ask for as much money as it can go with.
* The goal of an internal provider is always offer as much as it can asking for as little money as it can.
Somehow a lot of managers don't seem to get this simple fact straight.
Re:Also (Score:4, Insightful)
You just summed up one of MS's great strengths -- availability of expertise for the platform.
Take Exchange. If you get stuck in any phase of Exchange use, be it planning, deployment, expanding, security, backups, archive, availability, or failover, one can find consultants and books with relative ease. If someone needs an Exchange server for home, that is quite easy to do. Similar if someone wants a hub/edge configuration with incoming mail, outgoing mail, OWA, mobile device, and on the inside, multiple mail hubs for redundancy.
This doesn't mean Exchange is the be all and end all for messaging. It just means that being able to get Exchange working is easy for a lot of businesses. Perhaps Domino might be a solution, but trying to find the Notes experience is significantly more difficult than Exchange brainpower.
There is no magic bullet. For a small company with 5 people that want E-mail hosted securely, a PC with RedHat Enterprise Linux and POP/SMTP/IMAP might be the solution of choice. For another SMB, a machine running Microsoft's SBS might be the answer. Still another SMB might just use a hosted Exchange provider so they do not have to bother with an always on network connection.
I worry though... Minnesota pretty much jumped off the diving board and it seems that they didn't even check if there is water below them. If they were moving to a new platform, there are plenty of other options to explore on the spectrum before just going whole-hog with a relatively nascent technology architecture.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:3, Insightful)
OSS is really no worse that something like SAP installs... those have permanently damaged fortune 500 companies far more spectacularly than OSS projects.. yet SAP has suckers lining up around the block.
Really, implementing OSS (or ANY large scale Information Systems change) amounts to having a centralized understanding of what your business really uses computers for. As the users are more "empowered" by off-the-shelf software, management has no clue what's really going on. Most of the time management doesn't really care... but then they try to cut "business" deals rather than "Information Technology" deals without knowing all the facts.
Re:That's Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just Linux, even this argument is getting really old now.
Then once the smallest problem crops up, people would go "Why did you switch to such a rubbish system? We should have gone Microsoft" - again irrelevant of the change in problem amount.
Unfortunately this is very familiar. Yet, this "rubbish system" question can sometimes be eased by rasing attention to the rubbishness-list of Windows itself. There are several annoyances that people don't even realize since they have grown more and more tolerant towards Windows, given they were never given the option or the opportunity to use anything else. Awareness needs to be raised that blind acceptance is not the way to go anymore. Of course this is a harder task than it sounds, still, I'd really want to see those countless open source "evangelists" (what an idiotic job description) make a freaking better job.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:3, Insightful)
How did users ever manage to transition from DOS to Windows 3.0 ?
Then to the totally-different Windows 95? (Not to mention WordPerfect to Winword.)
Then to NT with its Ctrl+Alt+Del "secure logon sequence"?
When people were shown KDE4, they just thought it was the next version of Windows [geek.com] with yet another interface that they had to learn.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:3, Insightful)
Its quite obvious you have never tried it. I have been involved in enterprise migrations from Windows to Suze, Suze to FreeBSD, FreeBSD to Ubuntu, and FreeBSD to OpenBSD (Different organisation, not my choice of OS). None of the above was more of a problem that moving from Win2k to WinXP. However, I have to admit that it was the infrastructure I migrated, and not the workstations.
As has been said by previous posters, 90% of users could not tell a migration to Ubuntu from a Windows upgrade. The other 10% would probably recognise it as an improvement.
As for the argument that Linux support people cost more, you need far fewer of them. I believe the industry standard figure is in the order of 1 Linux person where you had 4 MCSEs. They also probably deliver more, because "support" in a Linux environment means providing additional facilities. "Support" in a Windows environment means reimaging machines. Support from Microsoft means "Jack Shit". Personally, I have never heard of MS support being an improvement on RTFM.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:3, Insightful)
"otherwise he would know that with volume licensing from Microsoft, the support is included"
Unless you pay extra, the only support that comes with volume licensing from Microsoft is:
1) Support on the volume license procedure itself
2) Telephone support -on office hours, about install issues
3) Everything else is subjected to further charges
Maybe I'm mistaken and there's adittional support for free under basic volume licensing agreements. Can you, please, point me where can I read about it from an official source? Or else I might think you are just trolling.
Thank The Teflon Governor (Score:3, Insightful)
He has already shown a willingness to crap all over the state constitution in the name of keeping up conservative appearances, so this really should surprise anyone.
Re:Limux is doing OK, others have failed (Score:2, Insightful)
> The Munich transition is taking ages.
As it should, or rather, must. At least one of the failures which I listed appears to have been caused by bad planning and not having a reasonable goal --- in the case of Munich, the goal isn't hitting a given finish date, or immediate savings of money, but rather, independence from lock-in. Whoever got that to be understood to be the goal of the project was a genius, because it's one of the only goals for such a project that I can think of which Microsoft couldn't possibly undercut.
> It's been thwarted
You keep using that word. It's a bad choice for such a discussion, because a search of meanings using Google [google.com] gives a list which varies from "blocked, obstructed" to "defeated, disappointingly unsuccessful". I can agree that Microsoft blocked the transition for at least a year with FUD about Linux infringing its software patents, so the first definition would be OK. But for sure the transition isn't "disappointingly unsuccessful".
> The other failures are a problem that shows that the FOSS community
Actually, I think a very good case can be made about the other failures not involving the FOSS community whatsoever, but rather being the result of bad management on the part of the organizations thinking about transitioning. In fact, I think if your transition plan depends on the FOSS community doing anything specific for you, it's obvious you're doing it wrong. Very wrong.
open source does not mean cost savings (Score:2, Insightful)