Microsoft shops are increasingly wooed by other vendors with irresistible offers.
Over the past couple of years, Microsoft shops have been increasingly wooed by vendors offering alternatives to Windows, Exchange, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft wares. The competition has grown so fierce that in May, Red Hat went so far as to sue Switzerland (and win), saying that it could not grant Microsoft a no-bid contract for Office when so many other options exist.
Admittedly, no one should be digging Microsoft’s grave quite yet. A recent blog I posted on how GNOME will fair in 2010 generated far more support from companies sticking with Windows than replacing it for desktop Linux.
And yet, I’ve also gotten comments from readers like this one, in reference to a story about how most companies plan to switch to Windows 7: “We’re not switching. Our company will be sticking with XP. If and when PCs need to be replaced, we’ll be rolling out Ubuntu for just about everyone. The money we’ll save in licensing costs will be better spent elsewhere. We’ve already switched to using OpenOffice so there’s no retraining needed.”
So I spent some time looking into user stories of companies abandoning Microsoft products for a competitor. I found about a dozen and I boiled them down to seven representative stories. (Interestingly, although I looked and looked, I could not find a singe story of an enterprise abandoning Windows for Macs. So if you have, or know of, as story like that, please share it!)
The results of that investigation are compiled into the slideshow, Microsoft Rebels. Here are the seven companies profiled and the new vendor they moved to.
City of Los Angeles (Google Apps)
Equitec(Ubuntu Server)
Avago Technologies (Google Apps)
Serena Software (Google Apps)
Allianz(Red Hat)
New Zealand Post (Google Apps)
Major League Baseball (Adobe)
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