City Enters "Money-Saving" Partnership With Microsoft

Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith and Mayor Bloomberg look at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at yesterday's press conference (NYC Mayor's Office)

Because not all money-saving ideas can be found via an online suggestion box, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city was entering a "first of its kind" partnership with technology giant Microsoft: The deal "will consolidate the City's dozens of individual license agreements into a single one and will provide more than 100,000 City employees with state-of-the-art computing power." In other words, the city can save $50 million over the next five years by not having separate license agreements for all its agencies.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Microsoft's deal is a victory in its ongoing battle with Google to land service contracts with local, state and federal government. Last year, Google beat out Microsoft to provide web-based services to the city of Los Angeles. Now Microsoft has answered back with an even bigger and more comprehensive city deal that covers all 100,000 New York City employees. The contract wasn't a competitive bid like the deal in Los Angeles."

The commissioner of the city's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, Carole Post, who said that putting 30,000 city workers on Internet-based cloud-computing systems would speed up efficiency, told the WSJ that Microsoft's proposal was appealing from "both from a cost perspective as well as the suite of tools and opportunities. But Google said, "When there is a competitive bid process—like Colorado, Los Angeles and Wyoming—the majority of customers choose Google, and the rest get a great deal on their Microsoft license."

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By Jen Chung in News on October 21, 2010 9:55 AM

Comments [rss]

Best Registry Cleaner

Microsoft has had decades of a monopoly on business software.

Sulayman

Google Docs would have done this for a Fraction of the cost. And it comes with tech support and (much much cheaper) government licensing too!

Dan

it took the city this long to get a site license? are you kidding me?

Guest

Now if only they could come up with an invention that replaces those typewriters still used in NYPD precincts.

JenChungsBaby

There's a lot of money in the photo.

Spirit of 76

That's Bloomberg, all right. Always thinking with his wallet. Did the city also buy a 50,000-user license for Norton Internet Security while they were at it?

CR

No, they bought 50,000 licenses for Microsoft Security Essentials.

whatsd

Microsoft has had decades of a monopoly on business software. Happy to see Google is putting competitive pressure on them.

manuelmontalvo

if only there were some sort of open-source office software suite that could be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose...

eflash

so we can run a city on software with no guarantees of stability and no customer service?

streber

There's plenty of companies that will sell you support for open-source software.

Microsoft is very good at creating software that compels you to purchase their other software, which compels you to buy their OS, which compels you to pay for upgrades forever....

Open source software works, has support, and functions in many ways better than the microsoft counterparts.

Another BS way for the city to embezzle money. (who's the MS sales guy that got credit for this?)

longacre

a. They're already using MS Office products...do you know how much it would cost to retrain everyone to use Open Office? They are not identical, especially advanced functions.

b. They would still need to buy a support contract for Open Office, which could be even less transparent and an even bigger boondoggle as far as money wasting goes.

c. Open Office is fine for basic functionality, but it simply does not do everything that Office does, especially its spreadsheet functionality.

streber

>Open Office is fine for basic functionality, but it simply does not do everything that >Office does, especially its spreadsheet functionality.

Yeah, and excel totally sucks if you use your data anywhere but excel...

Working on a software migration, I get data dumps from a mainframe... and the folks dump it into excel... then I have to ask "Why are my 10-digit phone numbers in scientific notation?" and "Why do I have to get rid of all these '^M' characters?"...

Not to mention that the new xlsx format often crashes Excel on my mac... sure, I guess I COULD go buy a windows box.

Ie. that 'advanced functionality' you mention, is useless unless the whole world is on Windows.

Which should be, in principle, enough to not purchase their products. They aren't even compatible with their own products!

It took until 2010 to get an web version of exchange where I can search email in any browser besides IE? Really?

Retraining would save billions over time. Software support contracts are regularly 18% of purchase price a year.

50,000 versions of Norton would not be needed, no matter how many linux boxes you're running.

CR

Yes, but most people out there don't want to learn a new piece of software.

Spirit of 76

I think he's making a veiled reference to OpenOffice, which isn't any more unstable than Microsoft Office. And I would hardly consider Microsoft Office to have great customer support. Found a bug? Great. Send the error report to MS and wait a year for the next bug release, which may or may not fix it.