Defra’s overall investment totaled £312 million during the current spending review cycle and was intended to remove outdated platforms, retiring Windows 7 hardware and supporting essential national services, including flood systems and border operations.
According to Defra’s submission to Parliament, the program eliminated more than 31,000 legacy laptops, addresses a large backlog of vulnerabilities, and even closed one data center, with several more set for decommissioning over the coming years.
Defra did not confirm whether it intends to pay Microsoft for extended support, leaving open the possibility that the department’s refreshed estate may soon fall behind again.
There’s also literally billions of dollars to be stolen in that sector, so you’re up against the big tech companies literally making it illegal for you to use Linux with $5000 donations to local education officials.
Lol I’d love to see that happen. You’re not wrong. Right now, however, they don’t need to make donations. The windows orthodoxy is fucking strong. It stems from an underserved sector. Most districts in my state are under staffed on technical staff. In some cases they simply farm out the task to an MSP. No MSP in their right mind would offer Linux desktops, because an MSP likely can be a license reseller for Microsoft.
I’d love to push this co tradition. It would fucking drive people mad to learn how much we spend on license and addition subscriptions.
Start tracking it. Get counts and show charts on how much is spent on Google and MSFT products. Then show that in relation to other expenditures that actually help.
Show it internally, then if it doesn’t get anywhere, publish that shit. We should honestly make a tool that exposes hidden costs for this edtech garbage that anyone can use.
Also “donations” was a pejorative for lobbying and corruption. Guess they probably have the system so well captured now that they don’t even need to do that anymore though…
Yeah it’s fully captured except for the student device market which is dominated by iPad and Chromebooks. If they lost desktop the only thing left would be servers but desktop to severe isn’t a real big jump. I imagine we would still need some windows servers, things like for our video surveillance system.
The largest hurdle will be making the smart boards work. Sadly they had a version of notebook that was built for Linux but that’s discontinued now.
I’m pretty sure Azure (cloud services) is already Microsoft’s most profitable business unit. Windows and Office just provides some extra walking around money at this point.