Comment Re:how much did this all cost? (Score 4, Insightful) 314
They hope to save in the future. As a lot of the costs are consolidating their terrible IT landscape it is not clear, what a migration to the latest MS offering would have costs, either. It is not as if it would have been free either, who knows how many of the macros would have broken down when run in a current version of Excel, who knows how many old programs might stop working on Vista (and be it due to a stupid installer). It would have been cheaper, at least probably because a lot would have still worked, but when they write that they found 21 different Windows setups with differing patch levels and security settings, I am not so sure if it really would have been cheaper.
What they probably hope is, that the next migration will be cheaper, the OSS they use won't cost them to upgrade, the costs of the upgrade in work to be done by their IT department are probably not very different when upgrading a Linux solution from a MS solution. But all the work to get their systems closer to a common base might actually make the next big roll out simpler and therefor cheaper.