In a mathematical oddity, LA is going to lose money moving to free software. The city decided to head over to Gmail to cut costs in their time of dire budget straits.
However, it is going to end up spending 1.5 million dollars more it would have cost to keep their old legacy system.
Why, you may ask? It turns out that explaining Gmail to the employees of a city takes something called “training.” At first I was confused, given that Gmail is one of the simplest and most intuitive products ever created.
That must be the problem.
If you had been using Outlook, or god forbid Thunderbird for any period of time, to move to Gmail would be shocking. Where are all the bugs? Where are all the things that must be worked around to get something done? There are none? Quick, I need training.
Of course, some people never want to switch. Just look through your website’s statistics and find the guy on Windows 95. Some folks are just a touch slow.
Since Gmail will raise expenditures by $1.5 million, the total training cost must be higher than that. Subtract that savings of free software, and then find the difference.
Let’s say three million dollars. What could that possibly be spent on? Here, have some training. There we go, money saved. LA, really?
Some people just don’t get Gmail. I find it strange… Change they need :-)
(And if they want to keep using Outlook, why not? Gmail works fine in IMAP mode together with Outlook.)
What makes this exponentially egregious is that the consultant isn’t even from California, it’s my understanding the consultancy is from Virginia….I’m sure that increases the overall costs somewhat.
First off, it isn’t free. The city of LA is paying for Google Apps, which comes with a cost.
Secondly, not everyone gets and/or likes gmail. Non technical users find the UI, lack of folders, conversation views, etc, confusing. So if the mandate is everyone must use gmail’s web interface, then yes, there is going to be a big cost for re-training. The training probably isn’t just for gmail either (think Docs, Calendar, etc).
Gmail isn’t the holy grail of mail client/interfaces. Yes, they have added some cool features, but its not for everyone. From my experience, tech-savvy people get it, most non-tech don’t, and this is in a business environment (not my grandparent’s place). I’ve seen people go back to Yahoo or Hotmail because they couldn’t get gmail.
Finally, just sending users a link as suggested in the article is not going to suffice. We can’t assume everyone just gets it…
Come on, Alex, Thunderbird isn’t that bad :)…I’m using it since it was Netscape Mail and I haven’t have complaints about it (yeah, it didn’t have the bells and whistles of Outlook but I didn’t care).
“Hear, training.” Best line. Love it.
God forbid thunderbird?!?! Best mailclient ever! :)
Not only is it the non-free version, but it’s a specialized version of even that. It’s being hosted by Google but is entirely cordoned off from the rest of the Google server farm, and has extra security measures in place. Because they’re hosting government documents, including court documents. There’s a special name for the higher security service that LA is buying that I can’t recall. The LAPD isn’t being switched over yet until everything checks out with the rest of the departments. So you might want to do a bit of research before furthering FUD.
Oh, and the kicker is that a large portion of it is being financed by a monopoly settlement with Microsoft.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221100129
For more (factual) information
Hey Rick,
The LA Weekly article stated “free gmail.” I had a similar thought on Apps, but they said free, and I cannot really dispute them there.
And I disagree indeed that Gmail is not the holy grail of email.
But my point, I think, stands. They spent a bundle on training, for simple software. Sure, some training, I was being facetious, but the dollar amount is ridiculous.
We’ll, the deal was done through a partner. I’m going to assume there isn’t much of a margin for resellers of Google Apps, so they are making up some of the in the training costs.
Also, given that its 30,000 users, that’s a lot of billable hours for training time…