Icons look different, etc. People are ridiculously inflexible.

Yes, RedHat has been doing this for decades.

Thing is: RedHat probably can’t price match M$ in a bidding war, probably not even close.

Also true, and at this kind of rate we can assume the state is doing most of its own IT self-support without a lot of M$ hand-holding.

Your subscription price is the source of those dividends. It pays the shareholders, it pays the sales staff’s commissions, it pays for management, it pays for executive salaries and bonuses, it pays for legal counsel, it pays for political lobbying. Your subscription price is working hard, for the company, not for you.

188K dollars or euros, is basically the cost to put one warm sales body in the territory, to keep the hooks in acknowledging that they should be paid for their software.

To me, it’s about digital sovereignty, and the states should stand on their own two feet and know how their own computers work, not just rely on a foreign company.

I’m guessing it’s a really small state with not much IT going on.

As for cheaper to give for free: ABSOLUTELY. But, with free then they don’t have their sales guys in there talking with them, they don’t have the state “acknowledging the debt” and the legitimacy of their right to charge for their software.

In the 1990s M$ let the world pirate DOS and Windows with wild abandon, they were just happy that people were using their stuff and not others’. After the world was good and hooked, shortly after we all survived Y2K, they started turning the screws - requiring license keys for full functionality, getting serious about demanding payment.

Bill Gates net worth was “only” $30B before they got serious about charging for their software, today I see it’s over $200B even after all of Melinda’s philanthropy.

The old jibe was that Windows users are so gullible that they’re just easier to phish.

The easiest hacks use social engineering. Much more social to exploit in the end-user arena.

Depends on your relationship with Microsoft.

Small state.

I think it’s simple pragmatism. It will cost them, money and lost productivity, retraining all their computer users.

Regardless of the technical aspects, just the bitching and moaning of the workforce alone is enough to push the decision makers to take their chances with enforcers of the procurement laws instead.

I eventually migrated all my e-mail to gmail, because I don’t feel any satisfaction or value out of “beating the system” to make my personal domain work as an e-mail address.

Define smaller.

I gave up running mail through my own domain hosted by a “smaller” provider (Canadian hosting company with less than 1M clients) because I was constantly having delivery issues because somebody somewhere on an adjacent subnet got blacklisted for SPAM, or worse.

I agree with your assessment of e-mail… you either rent under a big provider or you spend countless hours playing whack-a-mole with whitelist-blacklist keepers. The big providers do this too, but they’re so big it’s not a major slice of their operation.

a crazy amount of money on license fees

License fees pay for development, sales, support, and profit. When you go open source you can skip the sales and profit, but you have to pick up a bit of development and ALL the support, which is considerable during times of big changes, like migration to a new desktop.

The German IT fish keep coming back for the bait - never bothering to avoid the hook.

enforcing 2FA for all accounts at our company directly caused at least 2 people to quit at my company.

Thereby measurably improving the workforce.

I just moved the things that sit on the ceiling and nobody notices!

Somebody noticed.

Cross platform app development has been a viable and very available choice for 20+ years now.

Organizations which are developing their specialty applications locked in to a specific OS… get what they deserve.

The names have changed. I literally had that conversation with “an engineer” 20 years ago wherein he concluded “I don’t know, if I have to learn new names for most of the programs I use (Word, Photoshop, maybe two others) I don’t think I want to use that other OS.” I had to support his position, if you can’t retrain to click on “Libre Office Writer” instead of “Office Word”, then a move to Linux isn’t for you.

the IT support will go through hell.

I thought IT support was already in perpetual hell?

For the last 10+ years “the desktop” has been over 90% the browser, and the Chrome, Firefox, Edge user experiences are pretty similar to start with. Chrome on Linux vs Chrome on Windows is virtually indistinguishable.

I gave my wife a Dell laptop new from the factory with Ubuntu on it about 3 years ago. The printer support in Windows was already bad, and yes it’s a bit worse in Linux, otherwise she just complains less and has fewer screaming fits of frustration.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/msft/dividend-history