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Microsoft to NHS: We Want your Money You can Cough in June or Cough Harder Later

posted by janrinok on Monday June 30 2014, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the arm-twisting dept.

azrael writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft is going after the UK's National Health Service threatening them with drastically increased software payments over claimed licence violations.

The company this month wrote to NHS organisations saying [recent NHS overhauls] made "this latest review and subsequent re-allocation necessary". It told the bodies to assess their software estate and cough for any "identified shortfall" by 30 June.

Microsoft's fiscal '14 closes this month and a spike in NHS revenues will help lift the numbers, no doubt, with some close to the company estimating several million pounds could be made from this audit exercise.

Any failure by an NHS body to hit the deadline this month will equally be a welcome boost to Microsoft's Q1 sales ledger for the next financial year.

How many shake downs will it take before the UK public sector realises that open-source solutions are a better option than being locked into a single commercial supplier's product?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Blackmoore on Monday June 30 2014, @07:40PM

    by Blackmoore (57) on Monday June 30 2014, @07:40PM (#62100) Journal

    MS is betting that NHS is too entrenched in the product to move to another solution.

    Which, might be right if NHS decided to hire cut rate programmers/Admins.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by purple_cobra on Monday June 30 2014, @09:48PM

    by purple_cobra (1435) on Monday June 30 2014, @09:48PM (#62162)

    I work in the NHS and while they don't pay peanuts at my large, well-regarded teaching hospital, they certainly employ a bunch of monkeys. A colleague was told her printer wouldn't work as they couldn't get a 64-bit driver for it; she would have accepted this had I not been sat there to ask why a 32-bit OS would need such a thing. The catalogue of disasters is quite lengthy but the *reason* it's so bad is that they employ former nurses as managers for damn near everything, including IT. I don't think a corporate network of ~4500 users should have, as its ultimate overlord, someone who used to wipe backsides for a living before he got too fat to fit between the beds, but I am humble keyboard monkey who doesn't even work in that department, ergo my opinion means naff all.

    • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday June 30 2014, @11:39PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Monday June 30 2014, @11:39PM (#62240) Journal

      someone who used to wipe backsides for a living before he got too fat to fit between the beds

      One of the downsides of social healthcare is that it attracts people who aren't in the best of health. This may contribute to poor decision making.

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