Luca Priorelli’s Blog

Here is the story. The local government of the Regione Marche in Italy, has purchased a subscription to the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement in 2002 and is in the process of renewing it for the next 3 years. The estimated cost for this renewal will be around € 720,000 (about 992,614 US dollars). What do they get with this Agreement? In MS words: “The rights to the latest Microsoft software products” which consist mainly of Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista.
This wouldn’t be anything unusual, if it were not for a few facts worth noticing:

1. All the computers they purchase, have Windows Vista pre-installed, therefore they buy a Windows license with the PC even though it wouldn’t be necessary given the Agreement.
2. Upgrading an old computer to Windows Vista is unreasonable and worthless, therefore they wouldn’t be able to use the Agreement for legacy HW.
3. All their computers already have a Microsoft Office 2003 license and there is no point on upgrading to Office 2007 when you consider that a) the office suite is a mature product since version ‘97 and that all the subsequent versions are mostly eye candy and b) that people use only a limited subset of the ‘97 version anyway

Plain stupidity or private interests?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at %1:%Jul %p and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.