Our tech guys are absolute wizards, most with a fair business understanding. Replacing just one of them is around $500000 with no guarantees that we could find someone suitable.

We're a medium sized municipality in Scandinavia sitting next to the largest one in the country, meaning that getting good tech staff is already extremely hard with the popular technologies.

The staff who work here now do so because of benefits or ideals, not the pay, where we will never be able to compete. On top of that it's taken more than 25 years and five different middle managers to build the right kind of culture.

I'm sorry, but why would we ever want break that? And why on earth would we do it to possible break free from the Microsoft lock-in 25 years from now, when Microsoft licenses are less than 1% of our IT spending?

And that's just the tech perspective. We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering how integrated the office365 platform is here. And where is the open source alternative to 365?

(I'm sorry for the wall of text if you were being sarcastic)

> We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering how integrated the office365 platform is here.

I'm confused did you educate them in using office365, or even in using Office 2007 (which was a big change)? I.e. were there courses they all attended? Or did you just update them and them and they had to learn? Similar with the OS, did they go on Windows 8 and windows 8.1 and windows 10 courses or did they just get the update?

I agree that FLOSS lacks a great office suite alternative. I totally disagree with the concept that if there were your users would need to be re-schooled.

Yes we reschooled people from 2007 to modern office.

You can't imagine how many man hours teaching one drive for business cost us.

We did a comparrison of open office and google docs vs ms office when we did our business case of course. Open office lost by around 1400% with some employees never learning it.

We don't just use office365 though, we use addons. Like automatically sending electronic mail through APIs that integrate with the national platform while using a custom template and journalizing into our record system.

Hell, we've build two word adding ourselves allowing citizens to digitally sign documents with their public identification.

> Yes we reschooled people from 2007 to modern office.

As in actual classes? How did this work? This sounds like an epic waste of money and everyone's time.

> We did a comparrison of open office and google docs vs ms office when we did our business case of course. Open office lost by around 1400% with some employees never learning it.

Yeah we've all done reports like this. They are usually an epic waste of time as usually everyone knows the answer they want before they start... I'm surprised that you managed to get results that were that favorable for the desired answer though - openoffice.org and the more recent Libre Office kept a similar UI to MS office 2003.

> We don't just use office365 though, we use addons. Like automatically sending electronic mail through APIs that integrate with the national platform while using a custom template and journalizing into our record system.

Sounds like 10-30 LOC each if you ran on FOSS systems (although obviously it is hard to tell without knowing what your exact requirements were) - I'm sure office365 saves you time/money in other ways though.

> Hell, we've build two word adding ourselves allowing citizens to digitally sign documents with their public identification.

Did you build libreoffice extensions as well? Or do you expect citizens to subscribe to your software choices? I don't mind what you do for internal software but forcing everyone to use the same software as you is a bad use of tax money.

Every citizen who doesn't opt out of it, is a digitized citizen.

That means they have a two-factor identity and an secured electronic mailbox hosted by us in the cloud.

So what our addons do is it allows a caseworker to send a document as a PDF directly to a citizen, who can then follow a link to our document signing server and sign it online. They don't need any kind of software to do so, because everything is supplied by us.

If they don't have a computer they can use one at a library our at our town hall. (Which run ubuntu by the way)

I get that you think we wanted office to win in our business case. That's not true, we simply show the political level the facts and they act accordingly.

I thought there are actually quite a lot of Linux developers in Scandinavia, though I have no idea about sysamdins. I agree that finding good specialists is always hard.

I'm not sarcastic. For the government organization, it can be just a matter of principle.

All the development we do ourselves is on .Net core, Java or Python so as far as development goes we're pretty much all open source. We even share a few systems with other municipalities through our official github.

When we buy systems open source isn't as important to us as ownership, but it's still relatively important.

Operations is a different story though. As mentioned we use Jboss, and we run it on CentOS. We tried hiring a sysadmin to run our Linux farm, but we've yet to find someone qualified.

So all our Linux servers are supported remotely by a consultant company.

You're correct of course. If the political will is there we could change it. It would be a nearly impossible task, requiring us to rebuild our entire infrastructure from scratch, retraining or replacing 50 staff members and rescooling 7000 as well as rebuilding around 200 systems, of which 50 are major and would have a replacement cost exceeding our entire yearly budget each.

If the government decided to take the country down that road, it would be a different and much more manageable story, and they kind of have. Open source is a priority in the official strategy of digitization, at least in Denmark.

But it'll take a looong time to implement, and we won't be starting with Microsoft because no one really wants to replace Microsoft with uncertainty.

"Lock-in", i.e. (economic) transaction costs, aren't exclusive to Microsoft. For every system or solution or whatever that anyone adopts there is some non-negligible cost to switch to something else.

Migrations costs and lock-in are orthogonal concepts.

Migration costs are just the costs of switching from one solution/product to another.

Lock-in is when you are in some form dependent on a monopoly.

Insofar as lock-in causes high migration costs, that is mostly because it forces you to migrate in the first place, unless you want to stay dependent on the monopoly. If you are using some software, say, and it's lacking a feature that you need, in a lock-in situation, you have to either buy that feature at the price the copyright owner of that software asks, or you have to switch to different software (which in turn is expensive because your data is, presumably, stored in some proprietary format and the company that knows how to read it is not keen to help you with migrating it to a different software). If you were using free software instead, or proprietary software that you yourself hold the copyright to, the migration would be cheaper because you would have the code to help you with migrating away from it--but more importantly, you probably won't have to migrate at all, because you can just hire any competent software development company from the market to implement your features, and if one company is overcharging you, chances are, you'll find one that is not.