German Government To Pay Over $850,000 in Windows 7 ESU Fees This Year (zdnet.com) 54
Running an outdated operating system will cost Germany some additional fee. The German federal government stands to pay at least $886,000 this year to Microsoft, according to local media. ZDNet: The sum represents support fees for over 33,000 government workstations that are still running Windows 7, a Microsoft operating system that reached end of support (EoS) on January 14, and for which Microsoft has stopped providing free security updates and bug fixes. Last year, Redmond announced a paid program for governments and enterprise partners. The program, named the are Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU), would provide paid access to Windows 7 security updates until January 10, 2023. ESU updates, for which the German government has recently signed up, cost between $25 to $200 per workstation, depending on the Windows 7 version a company is running (Enterprise or Pro) and the amount of time they'll need the updates.
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Isn't it obvious?
Microsoft is teh evil!!!1
$850,000 / 33,000 = $26.85 (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be very surprised if the lowliest janitor in the German goverment had a salary & benefits package of any less than 2 x $26.85 = $53.70 per hour.
Re:$850,000 / 33,000 = $26.85 (Score:4, Funny)
$850,000 / 33,000 = $26.85
I would be very surprised if the lowliest janitor in the German goverment had a salary & benefits package of any less than 2 x $26.85 = $53.70 per hour.
Depends on how many windows 7 computers he need to clean.
In the USA, it's called "OVERHEAD"... (Score:2)
You're looking at employer's matching SS, matching Medicare, unemployment insurance, annual leave, sick leave, Family and Medical Leave Act leave, pension, 401K/Roth contributions, medical insurance, life insurance, liability insurance, uniform, uniform laundering, tools, supplies, desk square footage [to include computer network access], security badge, boots [blue collar gubmint employees in the USA
$109,000 AVERAGE in NYC pubic skrewlz (Score:3)
Average NYC school janitor makes $109K a year
By Aaron Short
September 20, 2015 | 5:30am
https://nypost.com/2015/09/20/average-nyc-school-janitor-makes-109k-a-year/ [nypost.com]
In NYC, with their insane pension plans & benefits packages, that nominal $109,000 per year could quickly balloon to $250,000 in overall costs [to the taxpayers] in order for the employee to actually be employed.
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Given they're probably safety boots and such, this is generally expected that the employer would provide the necessary tools and materials to perform the job.
And yes, the government would buy top quality boots for things like this.
It's also expected because the lower you are on the employment scale, the less you can provide those materials yourself A janitor requiring entry into an area with PPE
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The lowliest janitors in the German government probably get a EUR 450 per month marginal employment wage. And what is this "benefits package" you are talking about?
Re:$850,000 / 33,000 = $26.85 (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to point out the same thing. This doesn't seem exorbitant on a per license basis for a year of security updates, depending on the level of services Microsoft is promising in return.
Maintenance has to get paid for, and it's reasonable for a vendor to draw the free support line at some point for a product it hasn't sold for years. The last official release of Windows 7 was eight years ago. If you wanted to get acceptably timely support for, say Debian "lenny" (roughly contemporary) you'd have to pay someone to do that.
The difference is that if you rally hate systemd, you can switch to a non-systemd fork of Debian. If you don't like Cortana, you have no choice but to keep your old versions of Windows running. It's actually pretty reasonable for Microsoft to give you that choice and charge you a reasonable fee for it.
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And the price seems extremely small compared to the cost of all those Windows 10 licenses, plus the cost of supporting and training all those users with a fundamentally different OS.
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I don't think "upgraded" is the correct word for that particular procedure...
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You think the rest of the developed world upgraded? Windows 10 was avoided immensely in many enterprises, even if down the street it was embraced warmly. It all depends upon if their IT departments were staffed with Microsoft Yes-men brainwashed in Microsoft certification classes, versus staff that care about providing good quality support to their employer.
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The only barrier to providing good quality support for Windows 10 more than four years after its release is the competence of your support staff... though with the glut of incompetent Microsoft haters, it's not shock that you seem to be struggling with that.
Spoiler alert... most companies with even passably decent IT departments long ago upgraded and there's zero reason for anyone to be running Windows 7 at this point aside from ignorance and incompetence.
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The reason to not upgrade is that it comes with many costs for no minimal benefit.
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Except a lack of security and support... yeah, no benefit at all.
At the cost was extremely minimal; at several points while MS was pushing to complete the transition they heavily incentivized it.
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If you have programes that work on 7 but not on 10, you need to fire your development team. In fact, I have yet to discover a single program that worked on 7 that I couldn't get to work on 10.
Cost of replacing incompatible peripherals (Score:2)
If you have programes that work on 7 but not on 10, you need to fire your development team.
Many programs that don't survive a major version upgrade to Windows are mostly third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications and third-party device drivers, not in-house applications. Who ought to be fired then?
Or the manufacturer of a multi-thousand-dollar business-critical peripheral refuses to provide a Windows 10 driver for the current generation hardware, which still works under the old operating system and is paid for, but is willing to sell another multi-thousand-dollar peripheral whose on
Taking bets... (Score:5, Interesting)
On there being another story 3 years from now about a German government crisis as they frantically attempt to patch their Windows7 machines only weeks before the ESU ends...
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Yes. Thsi is a catch-22 with governments. They are under immense pressure to save money, whereas all the third parties providing services to governments are doing their best to extract as much money as possible. Governments are not enterprises, they do not buy everyone a new laptop just because there's a new one available, and they do not upgrade their software just because newer software exists.
Remember, Windows 10 is less than five years old! Five years is a very short period of time to upgrade everyo
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You won't hear me denying that Windows10 is largely unneccesary other than Microsoft wanting to railroad people into it. But at the same time, governments have a big target on their backs for attacks, and central management is generally lacking in maintaining all those machines across however many departments/ministries/whatever. Between every department likely having their own IT staff, needing to retrain some workers about the new OS features that work differently, and said users actively sabotaging updat
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Its long since time we get them back
KAG2020!
Nanometer violin (Score:1)
That's whatchu git! [pcworld.com]
Errr... so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
So after a decade of free updates, they're paying for extended support? Why is this news? If I don't pay Redhat every year, I stop getting updates for my Linux boxes, and that's every year since release. Why is paying for life support such a problem?
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So after a decade of free updates, they're paying for extended support? Why is this news? If I don't pay Redhat every year, I stop getting updates for my Linux boxes, and that's every year since release. Why is paying for life support such a problem?
Unless you absolutely have to have Red Hat because you like their branding or the few proprietary things they offer or like having their support to ask questions of and get answers in a few weeks, you don't need to pay Red Hat. Just run CentOS... It's exactly what Red Hat is, without the price and without the support. Of course, if you want to pay Red Hat...
Cheap is as Cheap does and I run CentOS whenever I need what Red Hat does. (Not that Red Hat is my OS of choice...)
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Yes, you can use CentOS, Ubuntu, or whatever your favorite distro is. That's not the point. the point is "it's not news when you have to pay for a support contract from anotehr vendor, so why is it when you have to pay Microsoft?"
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It's greenwashing, they are keeping their decade old computers running Windows 7 going so they don't have to landfill them.
Recall some failed Linux deployments in DE (Score:2)
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If only they'd gone with RHEL 6, where this wouldn't become their reality until 30 November 2020 [redhat.com].
"Extended Life Cycle Support"? Surely that can't apply to Linux.
Reminds me of Austin Powers (Score:2)
Microsoft (as Dr. Evil): Unless you update all your computers to Windows 10 Chancellor Merkel, you have to pay us one meeeeelion dollars.
Then a henchmen informs Dr. Evil that $1 million is not really very much money any more -- and this is even less than that. The salaries and benefits of maybe 8 people? The chancellor's retinue for Davos this week probably cost more.
Peanuts (Score:2)
They wasted 560 mio € or more on a toll road scheme which was asserted by their own experts to be illegal before they signed contracts. Later the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the law illegal. Subsequently, they wasted 260 k€ on a expertise by lawyers to show that they did nothing wrong. Can we send these people to the US, they would fit perfectly to your current president.
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Only if they lied about what they did after clear evidence of their misdeeds is published. Trump has standards, y'know.
What a deal... (Score:1)
So yearly support for Windows 7 can be had for about $60/year? Yahoo!
Somebody needs to call the UK and tell the NHS there are options available for all their Windows 7 boxes they hadn't upgraded yet. Seems that for a pretty small price, well under the amount that used to go to ex-Prince Harry, they could keep going awhile longer.
that's not much (Score:2)
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I'm hesitant to Google "Windows 7 pirated updates"
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Bad but thereâ(TM)s worse (Score:2)
They could be like the UK NHS which is flushing millions down the toilet still paying for Windows XP support.
Australian government doing the same. (Score:2)
Australian Department of Defence and Australian Tax Office paying a combined ~6 million USD for the same.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news... [itnews.com.au]
This is on top of ~3.6 million USD to extend Server 2003 (!!) support in 2018.
And ~1.1 million USD to extend Server 2008 support. (both mentioned in the above article).
That's just two government departments for a country 1/5th the GDP of Germany.
Or, they could just use Linux (Score:3)
And pay nothing for updates. The Germans made a big mistake when they switched back to the Evil Empire.
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More than likely they're also paying Microsoft every year for a volume license agreement. I seriously doubt they're like your typical home user that bought Windows 7 in 2010 and has been getting free updates the past decade without giving another cent to Microsoft.
Assuming they have a volume license agreement is place, then actually updating to Windows 10 would have been "free" in the sense it wouldn't have cost them anymore than they're already paying Microsoft as those generally let you install whatever