Microsoft has recently gone to Munich claiming that the city wasted a lot of money by dumping its software in favor of Linux. At the same time, the software giant refused to provide proof, so everyone would just have to take its word for it.
According to both Microsoft and HP, the German city made a mistake when it calculated that switching from Windows to Linux saved Munich millions. Apparently, Munich has annoyed Microsoft by claiming that it saved over $14 million up to date. The software giant carried out one of its special Total Cost of Ownership studies, which found out that Munich would have saved more than $57 million if it had stuck with Microsoft.
The German weekly Focus, which had the figures in question, claimed that the software company wanted to say that if Munich had stayed with Windows XP and Office 2003 instead of choosing Linux and OpenOffice.org, it would have saved a fortune. Microsoft confirmed that the Munich’s own calculations didn’t consider all migration costs and compared the migration to a decade-old Linux version with a migration to a newer version of Windows (for instance, Windows 7). In case Munich had stuck with Windows, it wouldn’t have needed any new software.
In the meanwhile, the report found out that 25% of the desktops are still running Windows, as not all apps can be migrated to Linux. The results of the report were leaked to the press by one of the HP employees, but neither HP nor Microsoft are now willing to disseminate it more broadly.
Most of industry experts admitted that they couldn’t understand Microsoft’s reasoning, saying that it would be tricky to see how a Windows deployment can be any cheaper than a Linux alternative. Perhaps, the reason Microsoft wasn’t releasing the report is because the software giant suspected there were some mistakes in it.
After all, the software giant might be going back to the good old days when it used to print bogus reports about the total cost of ownership of Linux with fabled figures simply for marketing purposes
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