About 10 years ago, the government of Munich, a city in Germany, found that using Microsoft’s operating system was rather expensive. The government then switched to Linux, hoping that this will save it a lot of money. Come to 2014, it has now realized the move to employ Linux didn’t really get the result it was hoping for.
Vast majority of organizations in the city reflected a decline in their productivity, an official said. All of them have found Linux to be the reason for the suffering. The country was running Linux on over 9000 machines as of 2011. All these systems will now be switched to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and will be complemented with Microsoft’s productivity suite.
The city’s hope that they would save money using Linux was shattered when it had to pay programmers to make the operating system functional and personal for them, and take care of the maintenance.
“Microsoft has been flexible and helpful in the way we apply their products to improve the operation of our frontline services, and this helps to de-risk ongoing cost. The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the licence cost. So I don’t have a dogma about open source over Microsoft, but proprietary solutions – from Microsoft, SAP to Oracle and others – need to justify themselves and to work doubly hard to have flexible business models to help us further our aims,” Creese said.
Unlike the Linux operating system, users who want to use Windows operating system are required to pay a license fee — unless you’re in China, where many people are happily running the pirated version of Windows XP, 7, and 8. However, many organizations forget that Linux isn’t as user friendly as Windows operating system. So the cost cutting concept of switching to Linux fails in most instances.
