See this article in Newsforge.
“The City of Austin recently completed a group of pilot studies on the use of open source software in its day-to-day business … the results are in, and as a result, as many as 80% of the city’s desktops will be migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.”
“Brown noted in his email message that his department (Communications and Technology Management) will be the first to convert by uninstalling MS Office and putting OpenOffice.org in its place on about 300 desktops. The city has more than 5,000 desktops in total.”
This is huge, a really big deal. To illustrate this point how about some numbers. 80% of 5,000 computers is 4,000 machines. According to CDW Microsoft Office Standard is $559.08 (note that there are more expensive versions of Office than standard). So before any negotiated discounts we are talking about $2,236,320 dollars worth of software. Then you start to factor in upgrades every three years, the cost of supporting the environment with people, etc… and you get a much larger number. This is by no means going to hurt Microsoft in the short term, what it does is prove that it is possible.
What’s really interesting about this is that Microsoft cannot compete with open source software based on price (how do you compete with something that is free?). So their only option now is to compete based on value, features, etc. This will prove to be very good in the long run for consumers.