If everyone in their formative years would use Linux, then it would be a different story. But... they don't, so it requires reeducation. I think Mexico attempted it and I hope they were successful.
A successful software implementation requires a lot more than just software.
Tearing out all MS software at any large organization would involve quite a bit of compromise and many opportunities for failure.
Oracle?
Google?
Broadcom?
Executives don’t like to punish their own people because it makes them look bad. They’ll scapegoat people when necessary of course.
It was the government's security failure and not Microsoft's. Microsoft was up front about what was happening and the government could have pushed back if they did not approve of the digital escort system.
Lack of competition is definitely a problem in the pricing of some things, but I don’t think this is one of them, people just prefer what Microsoft offers and are willing to pay for it.
To be honest though, would I use it for my business? No. Broken formatting (for either my side or a client's side) isn't acceptable; the UI is two decades behind; LibreOffice Calc is still too incomplete; and who knows what's in a C++ codebase that old and that large (100,000+ files, 10M+ LoC) - it's basically security by obscurity. Microsoft Office getting hacked and fixed, is better than a target too small to matter until a government adopts it.
Google has made some progress here, but doesn't seem interested in a bunch of important spaces (e.g. they have Docs, but don't have anything like Active Directory or Sharepoint that I know of).
Microsoft is also often the default vendor, since virtually every big company has contracts with them for Windows and Office (at least) already.
A lot of the dependencies on advanced features are artificial. The government creates unnecessary rules/bureaucracy for itself such that only specific providers are able to meet those rules. Bureaucracy and regulations are designed to be anti-competitive and benefit large companies who fund the political campaigns.
The government really is oppressing one set of people to benefit another set of people. It has always been like this. Nothing changed fundamentally in the past 300 years except which group of people is being oppressed and which group is doing the oppressing.
IMO, the government should force major social media companies to allocate a portion of their ad space to the government for campaigns. So that anyone can run for office and can get enough attention in the media to build momentum, starting from nothing.
Anyway, the problem is deep and sits alongside a whole bunch of other problems. All greatly exacerbated by the design of the monetary system which gives the government access to unlimited money.
And, to be fair, so is every other software project with an imperfect track record, that continues to have users, whether FOSS or closed source.
datadrivenangel•4h ago
belter•3h ago
IAmBroom•2h ago
Boeing is "the only game in town". All other big-aircraft manufacturers are foreign.
behringer•1h ago
themafia•1h ago
So, to me, the "too big to fail" set absolutely includes "only game in town." It's really just a special case of it.