Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246

There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.

The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.

But the impact is deeper nowadays.

What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?

I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.

But that could change after the last couple of mistakes by MS.

Do maybe it's still in the head of the people but it could backfire.

Not as much as it used to be, now that they can do most of what they need with Google's free apps

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.

So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.

> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed

Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

> and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source? If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.

> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?

"They" is Microsoft.

> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.

No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.

If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

> It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, because only the Open Source community ever does that. Corporations never do... /s

(The "Google Graveyard" site is famous, but wasn't there one for Microsoft too? I want my Microsoft Bob to be maintained, dammit!)

ETA:

> The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

...that they're idiots. That's what you meant, right?

You forgot to quote this part:

> Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

I hadn't made any other point before that, had I? That isolated bit was my entire point.

It's reasonable. What would be strange is that they relied on Chinese or Russian software to run their government. That's sort of what we, the Europeans, do when we use Microsoft tech in our governments.

Not just Americans. MS Office is the standard (at least) in the western world.

America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.

That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.