In the corporate world, Microsoft Office is treated as a defacto standard. If your clients / contractors / suppliers use it, you use it to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. Even though LibreOffice is perfectly suitable for internal use, and compatibility with MS Office is fairly good, nobody wants to risk misinterpreting expensive contractual obligations or engineering specifications on “this spreadsheet will probably function correctly and produce legible graphs.” Same goes with other industrial software like the Adobe Creative Suite, or various CAD/CAM systems. If your client uses SolidWorks, you are using SolidWorks to interpret their models and to verify nothing gets lost when exporting to other formats. Doesn’t even matter if your proprietary non D.P. Systems CAD software is capable of importing a SolidWorks model directly.
As far as Windows itself goes, it is assumed everybody is familiar with Windows and it is deployed to minimize employee training costs, even though the company ends up paying a shit ton for absolutely fucking nothing they get out of it. Training is a waste of money. Replacing legacy systems which are “still working” is a waste of money. Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
I’ve worked advising tech for large companies snd this is pretty much my experience, too. Then, you have a non-technical issue that can really tip the scales: enterprise tech (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) has an army of salespeople who range from fully technical evangelists that will tell you how good the tool is, to complete sleaze bags who only use PowerPoint and will promise the world in order to get a sale.
These companies overpromise so much it verges on false advertising, and they have these multi-year migration, implementation and support deals that unless you have a resident IT nerd who you know will stay for years at your firm, and who for some reason is really invested in using free software, will never be matched by any non-private alternative.
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Plus, most corporate leadership, even those in technical roles, are salespeople (good salespeople raise to the top because corporations select for the hegemonic ideal of person, who incidentally fits well into sales) so when a tech company salesperson comes it’s pretty much
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Training as well. Training is huge. Setting Microsoft aside for a moment, there is a very similar dynamic at play in mechanical engineering. These ludicrously expensive CAD/CAM packages sell for thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars per seat. They have slick branding, slick marketing, big-time Fortune 500 clients they can point to. They are legitimately more capable and refined than Free Software alternatives, but by an ever-shrinking margin. We’re at the point where we can do FEM (material deformation under load) and CFM (fluid dynamics) and 3 axis milling in FreeCAD. It is perfectly suitable for a lot of general mechanical engineering applications at this point. Sure, your models will explode every now and then, but what the proprietary marketing materials don’t tell you is that the same thing will happen on their expensive shit if you are not very methodical about how you construct your models.
What they have going for them (much like Adobe) is that aspiring architects, engineers, and industrial designers go to college and learn THEIR software, and run into most of these problems before they hit the proper workforce. Then they might intern under the wings of experience engineers who have spent 20 years figuring out every single way a model will explode in their system. To everyone else, as long as the marketing materials say “state of the art” enough times, it is so.
No Free Software application has this kind of training infrastructure in place. I think in academic settings specifically, there is a major failure when it comes to software training. People learn “How to use Microsoft Word” instead of the bigger picture “How electronic documents are produced, processed, printed, and archived.” There’s a micro-focus on specific software functions and menus and hot-keys instead of taking a step back and investigating multiple ways things can be done, and which might be most appropriate in which situation. What happens when you decide to change the font size in your 300 page manuscript? Does it completely explode? Do you have to change the font independently on all 300 pages? Or did you properly define and use text styles throughout your document? Did you properly use page breaks instead of mashing the Enter key? These are the kind of problems people should be learning to solve, which apply in any word processing system, not how to specifically flip an embedded table in a Word document. It is the same with CAD software. It is micro-focused on specific CAD systems, instead of taking a more general overview of how components like file formats, CAD kernels, algebraic constraint solvers, coordinate and feature reference systems, etc. work. The engineers I work with are good enough at making models and blueprints within the ecosystem, but they keep trying to send me 3D models in IGES format and stuff like that when I need to process them in a third party CAM system. It is clear the CAD training they recieved is extremely application specific.
Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
The capitalist ethos really is “Do nothing to fix anything until absolute disaster happens, and even then, give the absolute bare minimum bandaid solution”, huh?
In the corporate world, Microsoft Office is treated as a defacto standard. If your clients / contractors / suppliers use it, you use it to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. Even though LibreOffice is perfectly suitable for internal use, and compatibility with MS Office is fairly good, nobody wants to risk misinterpreting expensive contractual obligations or engineering specifications on “this spreadsheet will probably function correctly and produce legible graphs.” Same goes with other industrial software like the Adobe Creative Suite, or various CAD/CAM systems. If your client uses SolidWorks, you are using SolidWorks to interpret their models and to verify nothing gets lost when exporting to other formats. Doesn’t even matter if your proprietary non D.P. Systems CAD software is capable of importing a SolidWorks model directly.
As far as Windows itself goes, it is assumed everybody is familiar with Windows and it is deployed to minimize employee training costs, even though the company ends up paying a shit ton for absolutely fucking nothing they get out of it. Training is a waste of money. Replacing legacy systems which are “still working” is a waste of money. Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
I’ve worked advising tech for large companies snd this is pretty much my experience, too. Then, you have a non-technical issue that can really tip the scales: enterprise tech (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) has an army of salespeople who range from fully technical evangelists that will tell you how good the tool is, to complete sleaze bags who only use PowerPoint and will promise the world in order to get a sale.
These companies overpromise so much it verges on false advertising, and they have these multi-year migration, implementation and support deals that unless you have a resident IT nerd who you know will stay for years at your firm, and who for some reason is really invested in using free software, will never be matched by any non-private alternative.
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Plus, most corporate leadership, even those in technical roles, are salespeople (good salespeople raise to the top because corporations select for the hegemonic ideal of person, who incidentally fits well into sales) so when a tech company salesperson comes it’s pretty much
Training as well. Training is huge. Setting Microsoft aside for a moment, there is a very similar dynamic at play in mechanical engineering. These ludicrously expensive CAD/CAM packages sell for thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars per seat. They have slick branding, slick marketing, big-time Fortune 500 clients they can point to. They are legitimately more capable and refined than Free Software alternatives, but by an ever-shrinking margin. We’re at the point where we can do FEM (material deformation under load) and CFM (fluid dynamics) and 3 axis milling in FreeCAD. It is perfectly suitable for a lot of general mechanical engineering applications at this point. Sure, your models will explode every now and then, but what the proprietary marketing materials don’t tell you is that the same thing will happen on their expensive shit if you are not very methodical about how you construct your models.
What they have going for them (much like Adobe) is that aspiring architects, engineers, and industrial designers go to college and learn THEIR software, and run into most of these problems before they hit the proper workforce. Then they might intern under the wings of experience engineers who have spent 20 years figuring out every single way a model will explode in their system. To everyone else, as long as the marketing materials say “state of the art” enough times, it is so.
No Free Software application has this kind of training infrastructure in place. I think in academic settings specifically, there is a major failure when it comes to software training. People learn “How to use Microsoft Word” instead of the bigger picture “How electronic documents are produced, processed, printed, and archived.” There’s a micro-focus on specific software functions and menus and hot-keys instead of taking a step back and investigating multiple ways things can be done, and which might be most appropriate in which situation. What happens when you decide to change the font size in your 300 page manuscript? Does it completely explode? Do you have to change the font independently on all 300 pages? Or did you properly define and use text styles throughout your document? Did you properly use page breaks instead of mashing the Enter key? These are the kind of problems people should be learning to solve, which apply in any word processing system, not how to specifically flip an embedded table in a Word document. It is the same with CAD software. It is micro-focused on specific CAD systems, instead of taking a more general overview of how components like file formats, CAD kernels, algebraic constraint solvers, coordinate and feature reference systems, etc. work. The engineers I work with are good enough at making models and blueprints within the ecosystem, but they keep trying to send me 3D models in IGES format and stuff like that when I need to process them in a third party CAM system. It is clear the CAD training they recieved is extremely application specific.
The capitalist ethos really is “Do nothing to fix anything until absolute disaster happens, and even then, give the absolute bare minimum bandaid solution”, huh?