£1 in every fiver that UK biz, public sector spent on software in 2017 went to *drumroll* Microsoft Microsoft accounted for almost £1 in every £5 that Brit businesses and the public sector spent on software in 2017, unsurprisingly clinging to the top spot in the spend rankings. The research, published by analyst TechMarketView (TMV), revealed a total of £7.353bn coughed on enterprise software – licensing, maintenance and …
Microsoft sell that greatest number of licenses and in some cases for high prices. Customer retention is the key, not price/quality. What we would want to know is how much that software increased or decreaed worker productivity.
The future is in the clouds! Buy British Airways.
Not surprised with the MS money train. Our company paid MS £0.25m last year just for the privilege of running their software. We didn't do any major upgrades, or change anything, but their SA costs have skyrocketed as they try to push businesses to their cloud subscription services and O365 (and don't even talk to me about those).God-dam scheisters!
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Watch how the ‘impressive growth in Microsoft’s cloud revenue’ increases their market share next year.
If it doesn’t grow can you please stop shoveling the crap from their PR team down our throats?
Moving dollars internally from unfashionable buckets like licensing to fashionable ones like ‘cloud’ to impress gullible analysts and boost the share price is the oldest trick in the corporate book.
There are a few things here.
1) Are they paying the right market value for the software and not being ripped off. By which I mean for each SKU rather than if MS Software is a rip off :)
2) If MS software is the best choice, then why begrudge paying money for it. Obviously "best" is very subjective and will be some combination of "best software for the job", cost, "supportability" and what's supported by the vendors of the software that it runs on.
Waits for the flames -->
I just think that there's many IT shops that were born and bred on Windows and a migration to something else is to onerous to complicate. Where I'm working now the fact that Marketing insist on having a few Macs on the network causes no end of headaches.
Windows works in most cases (for a small organization with low transactions and vendor supplied apps that need Windows). Wheres the motivation to start a multi-million pound "migrate to Linux" project that will ultimately fail (see Cologne) when the status quo is working just fine.
There's probably a line they could cross with licensing but they are nowhere near it (unlike Oracle who are shedding customers hand over fist apparently).
"migrate to Linux" project that will ultimately fail (see Cologne) when the status quo is working just fine.
Or conversely look at the French migration of the Gendarmerie to Linux, both workstations and servers. That has been working since 2001. I doubt the MS salesmen even considered passing out the stuffed brown envelopes because doing so would have meant doing time inside unlike Cologne where MS paid for the rejection of Linux.
"Or conversely look at the French migration of the Gendarmerie to Linux, both workstations and servers. That has been working since 2001."
That Linux system is only providing "web kiosks" for the front line plod to complete online forms. The French Police still have over 12,000 Windows PCs for doing real work on, and there are no plans to ditch those.
"The police and the gendarmerie are different organisations. They don't even depend on the same ministries (interior and defense). Stop trolling and spreading FUD. The gendarmerie seems quite happy."
Thanks for pointing out the difference. However it is in fact the gendarmerie that still have 12,000 PCs for real work. As a quick Bing of the project details confirms.
Realistically what's the alternative? Apple, Redhat, Postgres, Java etc. are American too.
As a thought exercise, I tried to see how British I could make the IT. I got as far as running a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu for the desktops; but there's nothing really to run on them beyond that. That wouldn't get any servers* or storage either.
*I can't think of any UK server selling servers with ARM chips (happy to be corrected)
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Having seen at first hand, it is all to easy for large organisations to carry on paying Microsoft for CALs for users who never logon or have stopped using the system. It took a while to get the message across but let's only pay for accounts that have authenticated on Active Directory in the last quarter and stop giving away money for nothing!
So, imagine for one sec, how much you could squeeze out of, say, Linux Mint, if you donated £1bn ?
Why are they wasting tax payer money? With £7.353bn you could easily finance your very own Linux distribution, with dozens of kernel devs, hundreds of devs and support personnel... over a ten year period!
Oh Crap!
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government/updates
'30 March 2017 published amendments
Introduction to Open Document Format (ODF)
This has a new intro as it was unclear software needs to be downloaded before using ODF.'
We're doomed.
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