MS is extremely flexible with pricing in their EAs. They can make any arbitrary product pretty much free by gladly readjusting prices, discounts and benefits in other parts of the agreement.

It wouldn't surprise me if they made the switch appealing by this sort of shenanigan, but client CALs are pretty much free already at volume. It's the server licenses where they kill you ... but with Azure flexibility as an option, not to mention O365, it's super-easy to see how MS makes lock-in look very, very appealing.

source: use to own the MS EA at an F200 company that tried to extract Office in favor of Google Drive + LibreOffice, and Windows Server + SQL Server for CentOS + PostgreSQL.

I think the assumption is incorrect. The Microsoft Office suite is used a lot, IIUC

Concur. The office suite and surrounding ecosystem (Exchange, Sharepoint) are king in enterprise environments. The latest versions run poorly or not at all on anything other than Windows.

But the linux alternative for those tools are exceptionally decent and free.

I'm not a heavy MS Office user. But at my current job I get to use Office 2016, while at my previous job I had to use LibreOffice. While LibreOffice is usable its just nowhere near the quality of MS Office. I take this as an example, because I think this is the tool most people will be talking about :).

As a programmer my company shelves out a few hundred dollar per year so I can use a high quality IDE. In the end this saves time and money.

If I would be a business analyst or PO I would expect the company I work for to shelve out a few hundred dollar per year for the apps I need in my day to day work. In that case it would be MS Office (and Windows).

(MS Windows Enterprise edition is only $90 per year, Office $360, that's a lot less expensive than my developer tools).

Good tools save money, and currently I can't think of anything that surpasses MS Excel, MS Word, or MS PowerPoint

Open/LibreOffice compared to MS Office is a joke in a corporate environment where Excel and Powerpoint are kings.

There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook good luck linking Thunderbird to your conferencing and meeting room management systems.

> There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook

This is an argument I've never understood. Why do you want your calendaring mashed together with your mail? I much prefer the macOS model, where mail, calendar and contacts are separate applications. Nothing prevents them to use the same data store, but not having to switch them in modal mode is a big win.

Because when you need to juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones it's much easier to kick everything off in a single email and having full visibility into who is available and when, and then having all of the resources needed for the meeting to be automatically reserved.

The latter is especially important when you have different conferencing / dial in systems in different regions that all need to be reserved and tied to the same meeting request.

This isn't about having different apps that model has no advantage or a disadvantage the ability to see the presence of people and resources across the entire organization is the big important feature that is not available on other platforms at all or without a momentous amount of work.

Separate applications do not break that; you can still send that meeting request from the calendar app, or see availability when writing an email.

Just because they are separate application does not mean, that they do not operate on the same data. However I appreciate when I can use the full-blown GUI to look at calendars in another window, even when I'm in the middle of composing an email. The modal switcher in Outlook was one the worst thing I've experienced in productivity software.

> juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones

For some reason I thought that you where still talking about German provincial government. Which was extremely funny for me to imagine since those guys are not even allowed to speak English in official capacity.

Even for them it can make a lot of difference the only thing I need to do to book a room is to forward an email of the invite of the meeting to the booking system and it would book a room for me and setup the conference system to automatically call in that is a convenience that is hard to give up when you don’t have Exchange and AD that have all the user and resource info stored for multiple systems to hook into.

Imagine you go to the office canteen and suddenly you get Asian food and chopsticks. But all of you want your traditional, local food served along utensils you want and know how to use.

It's not possible anymore because Asian food and chopsticks are a decent and cheaper alternative.

Also not allowed to pack lunch. Also you get penalized for not being able to eat fast enough to meet your targets. Also you have to eat that food 8 hours a day, every day, for as long as you stick around. Well... imperfect analogy but I hope the point is clear. :)

So it's not just the fact that enterprise support for Linux solutions is flaky at best, that the tools themselves are many times nowhere near as powerful as they need to be, or that there is no coordinated strategy to push Linux in the enterprise where it should be going because the promoters never seem to be interested in having the "end-user" tell them what they want and how they want it. Sometimes it can be a lot simpler: the users don't want it. They don't feel comfortable with it so they won't do a good job with it.

This is one of the most common things IT departments all over the world get wrong: instead of enabling their users to do their job better they try to just dictate how to do it with solutions picked in a vacuum.

Just pick the right tool for the job and make sure you have the people using the tool to confirm it's right and you're good.

As someone, who in the past life spent some time gathering requirements for enterprise software: no, most users do not know what they want. You will mostly meed McGregor's type X people, who do not even care. If they tell you something, it is the Car built for Homer. Several of them, each different and mutually exclusive with another, in fact.

So your job would be finding those of the few type Y folks and work with them. Even if they are enthusiasts, they still might not see the forest for the trees. Also, that doesn't necessarily mean, that their info you will get you near your objective; you will still have to satisfy many more people, who will not use it, but have their own ideas how it should look and behave, even if it will make life harder to those using it (see also: exactly which programmer wanted open space office?).

There is no perfect answer for these problems.

OK, maybe I wasn't clear enough with my words: I meant "the business". People who understand the needs of that business and their processes because they are the business. Not necessarily the end users themselves. Although it's your business experts who trickle the needs up the ladder.

IT taking decisions in a vacuum without implicating the people who know the business is how you end up spending millions to implement some solution only to see how things get even slower and people spend more time avoiding it, adapting it to their needs, complaining about it, than doing actual work.

Good IT is based on a set of principles that tend to be more stable, not on a set of tools that can change from one day to the next. And when you overlay the needs of your business over those principles you'll come up with the best tool to use. Putting the tools first means you're doing it wrong.

So if it's an accounting firm you might want to talk to some accountants or to someone who really understands their work and their needs before deciding that "EZ Spreadsheets" is the way to go because it's free, or because it's open source (and you love open source), or you worked with it in the past and liked it.

What’s a better Linux alternative than Outlook? I’ve tried Thunderbird and I’m not impressed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of Linux users equate “free” (as in price) with “better”, and this isn’t necessarily so.

Kontact was KDE's attempt at integrating its productivity stuff into one app, I liked it for a while when I lived in email+calendar world, but I don't think it speaks Exchange if that's what you mean.

Evolution can talk to Exchange servers. I would have preferred Thunderbird, but so far Evolution has done nothing to annoy me.

Maybe but it's like showing up with a shiny new street Mercedes at a Formula 1 race. You'll just end up being the safety car.

Don't take each solution in a vacuum. Consider that you have to use one and put them head to head. Unless you're a very flexible company or with some very very niche requirements the MS solution will win every time.

People usually understand "Linux (open source) is no good" instead of the real conclusion: today it's not the best for everything so why assume it should be everywhere?

I think this is a common situation: a worker is sent a non-trivial Word document, possibly from someone external, that will only be properly rendered in Word itself.

As my betters have already responded, the tools are decent in and of themselves, but pale when compared directly to Office.

Just in scientific consulting alone, for example, frequently the codebase is best manipulated in Linux, but documentation (reports, analysis) must be done in Windows, as there's a back and forth with the client who is frequently using Windows. Wine is unreliable, and often the only real options are either dual-boot or VM.

"Exceptionally decent"? It can't even be compared to MS Office in quality and usability.

How compatible are they? If I send you a word document with tables and layouts and strange things, will you be able to open, modify and send it back s.t. I can open it again without everything being one big clusterfuck?

Even that moves to the cloud though. I have not used the office 365 tools at all but from my understanding they should have feature parity at some point.

But then I suppose that editing a hundred page call to bids document in a browser tab does not really work well.

I'm under the impression that its more to do with external hardware compatibility like printer drivers (do industrial printers have linux drivers?), license plate scanners, etc.

I don’t know about license plate scanners, but usually the more industrial the printer, the higher likelihood that Linux will do just fine.

I think the main reasons are that big industrial printers are likely to support standards like IPP and Postscript. Also, Apple uses CUPS just the same as Linux. Some cheap home printers require proprietary binary drivers, but many printers are supported by CUPS with some minimal config definitions.