The reasons behind the move were global and complex, but for CIOs, it raises frightening new risks, where cloud or SaaS vendors can cut a company off with no warning.
It’s so absurd and seems like an alternative can’t even be discussed in most places.
I work in the public sector in my country and we use Microsoft. Thankfully not for client or patient info, but for everything else it’s windows and ms office.
There was a graph circulated here not long ago about how a mindblowingly large part of the budget of the entire state goes into microsoft licenses.
‘for-profit’ means ‘good’ because ‘they have a lot of money’.
‘proprietary’ means ‘good’ because ‘the code/infrastructure is obfuscated’.
‘widely used’ means ‘good’ because ‘more people with the skills to manage it’ and ‘it’s widely supported’.
‘open source’ means ‘bad’ because ‘anyone can analyse the code for exploits without reporting them’.
‘self-sufficiency’ means ‘bad’ because ‘that’s anticompetitive’.
they hear the phrases ‘supply chain attacks’ and ‘24/7 premium support’ and they’re sold. the more responsibility they can foist onto third-parties for when something goes wrong, the less liability they have.
in a lot of ‘developed’ countries: government at all levels are structurally forbidden from managing their own infrastructure. to ‘maintain the free market’ and avoid ‘anticompetition’ lawsuits, they procure development contracts via bids. Microsoft has the money and dominance to not only lobby governments to adopt their software, but can also outbid most other companies, and pays a lot of money to ensure there’s an army of Microsoft Certified™ office workers and technicians everywhere.
every time the government tries to do something by itself, or to exclude one company or another from the bidding process, the industry lobbies crawl out to screech about ‘competition’ and ‘free market principles’.
It’s so absurd and seems like an alternative can’t even be discussed in most places.
I work in the public sector in my country and we use Microsoft. Thankfully not for client or patient info, but for everything else it’s windows and ms office.
There was a graph circulated here not long ago about how a mindblowingly large part of the budget of the entire state goes into microsoft licenses.
Have they not heard of open source software?
they have, but they assume:
they hear the phrases ‘supply chain attacks’ and ‘24/7 premium support’ and they’re sold. the more responsibility they can foist onto third-parties for when something goes wrong, the less liability they have.
in a lot of ‘developed’ countries: government at all levels are structurally forbidden from managing their own infrastructure. to ‘maintain the free market’ and avoid ‘anticompetition’ lawsuits, they procure development contracts via bids. Microsoft has the money and dominance to not only lobby governments to adopt their software, but can also outbid most other companies, and pays a lot of money to ensure there’s an army of Microsoft Certified™ office workers and technicians everywhere.
every time the government tries to do something by itself, or to exclude one company or another from the bidding process, the industry lobbies crawl out to screech about ‘competition’ and ‘free market principles’.