I read the following story from MacWorld UK with interest, enough to look up the original story as well.

Telegraph dumps Microsoft for Google

The news that the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is moving to Google Apps and phasing out Microsoft Office and Exchange might in future be remembered as the end of the Microsoft desktop arm-lock? Well, it's worth a little speculation.

[From Telegraph takes Google, dumps Microsoft]

"We made a conscious decision not to refresh any of [the Microsoft infrastructure]. We're not going to remove it but we won't upgrade it. Some users might use Outlook as the client but we're moving to migrate people from Outlook onto Google by the end of the year. We're not going to rip and replace but we've decided not to refresh Office 2003 and we'll sweat that asset. Google Apps is good enough and rich enough for us to do what we need to do. Collaboration has been very powerful [in Google Apps] and as people use Google Mail and Calendar they'll naturally stray to use Google Docs.

But after reading the rest of the story (excerpt above) that this is not as dramatic as it may seem by reading the first part of the story.

First of all TMG is not dumping Microsoft at all - they only follow what a large number of other companies have also done - they have not renewed their automatic upgrade arrangement with Microsoft, and will therefore have to stay with the versions of the MS software they were using at the termination of the previous (3 year) contract.

This is of course far less dramatic - and nothing new or unusual at all, as new versions of MS office and Windows do not seem to give sensible ROI for companies that are already under pressure to reduce overheads.

So another (non-)story made up by a journalist giving it a spin - or IMHO falsifying the original quotes from TMG's CIO.

Technorati Tags: Web