[lwkl]

Microsoft offers their products to educational institutions for a fraction of the price. You just have to license your staff and get the licenses for your students for "free". And the staff licenses for education cost yearly what businesses pay monthly (MS365 E5 for about $90/year).

In return schools teach their students Microsoft products in school and you can't really beat the pricing. Because running your own infrastructure will be more expensive especially if your school isn't big enough to have it's own IT department. Prices are rising though because you can't license box versions anymore.

So you now have the choice of paying for Teams, SharePoint online and not using them and licensing and running your local file servers, AD etc. or switching more of your infrastructure to the cloud and increasing the lock-in.

This is really worrying to me, but from a cost perspective you can't really justify continue running a lot of infrastructure, especially if your local government doesn't have a lot of funds in the first place. I'd rather spend that money on hardware that the students and teachers can use than pay for servers and licenses.

[Godel_unicode]

> ...you can't license box versions anymore.

Of course you can:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

[lwkl]

Yes I‘m aware boxed versions are still available. But they aren‘t available under the contract the state negotiated with Microsoft. And that’s the terms the schools use to buy licenses if they don’t want to pay a premium.

To change this there would have to be political will to reduce the lock-in and maybe offer a state run cloud service.

[Godel_unicode]

There is absolutely educational pricing for boxed Office. It sounds like you might be upset about the choices your State made, and are conflating that with what is possible.