> I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses,
Can't speak for large organizations but some of the more well functioning places I have worked on has been running without much Microsoft services.
Also for many of us sysadmins in many cases we would say we would possibly save more from not having to deal with the hassle that is Windows than from just the licenses.
I mean: having to run and patch Apache httpd or other standard technologies on Windows is such a major hassle compared to Ubuntu or or any other mainstream commercial distro.
You can of course just use IIS, but then you have to deal with the hassle that is IIS.
This is a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea that Windows is somehow easier for everything is a bit unnuanced I think.
In that case, even better: (edit: I estimate) half the people at work run Linux or Mac. Linux percentage seems to be rising.
Officialy IT don't support Linux. Unofficially they'll be happy to make sure everything works.
We threw out MS Office many moons ago anyway, and management switched first and with genuine enthusiasm so it was no problem to get the rest of the company on board ;-)
And this is not the first place: Already in 2009 - 2012 I worked for two places like that; well one of them went further and almost completely banned Windows because the IT manager couldn't stand it. The other place just had a policy to let people choose, -and a dev team that would encourage people to pick Macs.
From 2015 I've been free to choose my own OS again.
Your experience is very different from mine. A cursory review of usage stats and other things indicates that my experience is probably far more typical.
Can't speak for large organizations but some of the more well functioning places I have worked on has been running without much Microsoft services.
Also for many of us sysadmins in many cases we would say we would possibly save more from not having to deal with the hassle that is Windows than from just the licenses.
I mean: having to run and patch Apache httpd or other standard technologies on Windows is such a major hassle compared to Ubuntu or or any other mainstream commercial distro.
You can of course just use IIS, but then you have to deal with the hassle that is IIS.
This is a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea that Windows is somehow easier for everything is a bit unnuanced I think.