True. It is already happened at least once in Germany that a municipality decided to ditch MS products in favour of open source, and went back after people started complaining that buttons are in the wrong places.
Also, AFAIR Bill Gates personally and in person intervened and paid a visit to Munich's mayor Christian Ude.
Here is an interview with Christian Ude in which he mentiones that Bill Gates was unable to understand how reying on Microsoft products would make a city "dependent":
> Funnily enough, during the conversation, he kept making new financial offers, including what Microsoft would add to the price, for the school department, for example. They continually became cheaper by a million, another million, another million, and later a dozen million. That's how important the symbol of the renegade state capital of Munich, internationally perceived as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft.
This was Ballmer though, not gates. Maybe Gates had a separate visit.
Thank you, that's what I had in mind. The timeline is an amusing read, but as I read it it's really a mix of "buttons in the wrong places" and lobbying.
The thing which stood out to me was the office suite incompatibility statement.
It's probably a legit complaint, but still potentially the fault of Microsoft. People learn how to use Excel, and the free alternative suites don't have all the same functionality (or if they do, it's not the same UI so you have to re-learn it).
And with as prolific as Office is, you're going to have to open office documents. If that doesn't work cleanly, that's a big issue.
I haven't looked into if whatever incompatibilities are a result of Microsoft pressure or technical shenanigans, or it just being a natural consequence of the free suites being less well funded in their development efforts.
I don't think it's impossible to run an enterprise with FOSS - but it is not easy.
It did already happen though. It's not just about buttons of course, there is a lot of lobbying, and if other people you are working with (e.g. other municipalities) stay on MS stack, there are going to be compatibility issues that will of course be blamed on the outliers.
The Wikipedia article doesn't make it obvious, but even Munich itself wasn't able to migrate everyone off of the MS stack. One of the linkrotted sources (https://web.archive.org/web/20180516042059/https://www.techr...) says they had about 17% of computers running Windows after the migration "completed" because some required programs couldn't run on their Linux distro. It's not obvious whether the working model was that 17% of staff used Windows exclusively or all staff had to find a Windows box to do some of their work, but either one sounds pretty obnoxious to me.
