Defra’s overall investment totaled £312 million during the current spending review cycle and was intended to remove outdated platforms, retiring Windows 7 hardware and supporting essential national services, including flood systems and border operations.
According to Defra’s submission to Parliament, the program eliminated more than 31,000 legacy laptops, addresses a large backlog of vulnerabilities, and even closed one data center, with several more set for decommissioning over the coming years.
Defra did not confirm whether it intends to pay Microsoft for extended support, leaving open the possibility that the department’s refreshed estate may soon fall behind again.
Start tracking it. Get counts and show charts on how much is spent on Google and MSFT products. Then show that in relation to other expenditures that actually help.
Show it internally, then if it doesn’t get anywhere, publish that shit. We should honestly make a tool that exposes hidden costs for this edtech garbage that anyone can use.
Also “donations” was a pejorative for lobbying and corruption. Guess they probably have the system so well captured now that they don’t even need to do that anymore though…
Yeah it’s fully captured except for the student device market which is dominated by iPad and Chromebooks. If they lost desktop the only thing left would be servers but desktop to severe isn’t a real big jump. I imagine we would still need some windows servers, things like for our video surveillance system.
The largest hurdle will be making the smart boards work. Sadly they had a version of notebook that was built for Linux but that’s discontinued now.
I’m pretty sure Azure (cloud services) is already Microsoft’s most profitable business unit. Windows and Office just provides some extra walking around money at this point.