Microsoft is to update the computers of New Orleans' City Hall and Police Department for free, according to a report last week in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, saving the city $100 million, claims CTO Greg Meffert. Work will begin in the next two weeks, and the city's only obligations are that it will be used as a model for marketing the systems to other government bodies, and that it will at some point in the future have to pay a "miniscule" amount of money for the software.
So where's the catch? Well, think browser market, and also think about cash-strapped public bodies' readiness to accept donations and subsidy from public-spirited IT vendors, and Microsoft's growing keenness to leverage this. Free to the extent that all of a sizeable body's systems are covered is perhaps a little more radical than what the company has done so far, but in the UK in particular there have been several instances of donation easing the acceptance of the Redmond shilling.
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