[veidr]

The cost of figuring out exactly what to contract somebody to build, though — especially for a non-technical bureaucratic agency — is likely to be fairly astronomical.

(I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!")

Windows probably really does work better out of the box for their use cases and user base, but I doubt they could tell you why exactly.

[bjkmhgcghm]

> I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!"

What are the arguments supporting the switch, then? One would think they determined there are some features missing from the Linux based setup and found out that the Windows solution has those, then decided that they have to switch. If this wasn't the case, then what are they basing their decision on? Flipped a coin, or simply corruption, or what?

[mtgx]

The $50 million is just for the switch. They'll probably pay a few million every year for the licenses. Yeah, I don't think they can justify it from a cost point of view. This move was political and Microsoft convinced them to do it by building an HQ there.