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A Preview of Ximian's Gnome 2.0 Desktop
TweetZilla writes "Dennis Powell has a good preview of Ximian's newest desktop. But does anybody care at this point? How many people still use Ximian's desktop? As opposed to Evolution?"
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The cost of keeping the basic Windows-office environment are often exaggerated, especially in case of large organizations. For large organizations Windows environment is as close to free as one can get ;-). Let's assume the following schedule the presuppose upgrades once in every three years) and no corporate discounts:
:-).
:-).
1993: Win3.1 ($100) MSOffice $500. Total $600
1996: Upgrade Win95 ($100). Upgrade MSOffice 95 ($300). Total $400
1999: Upgrade to Windows NT($100). Upgrade to Office 97($300). Total $400
2002: Upgrade to W2K($100) Upgrade MSOffice to Office 2000($300). Total $400
2005: Upgrade to Win 2002 ($100) Upgrade office to Office 2002. ($300). Total $400
That means that organization might spend on basic Microsoft software $2400 per employee per decade or $240 per year employee per year or less then a dollar a day. In USA that's approximately the same they spend for coffee
Take those numbers, per person, from 1995 to 2001, and then multiply them by 10K users and the cost of ownership for large organization is $3 million dollars per decade. That's not much for Fortune 500 companies (within the limits of a rounding error). Actually it will be less because for a Fortune 500 companies usually can negotiate much better deals with Microsoft and believe me that for a Fortune 500 company the cost of upgrade of to, say, Office 2000 will be less than $300 per user. May be 50% less.
Actually the cost is slightly more if you do not have "unlimited" licenses as you need to add time/resources spent on getting contract, and tracking licenses including a non-trivial controls which software goes with which computer. Tracking licensing actually adds ~$100K a year overhead, thaqt means that it can add as much as 30% to the the cost of software
And you need to weigh this against the cost of migrating, retraining and cost of support of open source environment. I think just retraining costs alone can be around $3 million for 10K users. That means that you did not get any substantial financial advantages for rolling out a pure Linux desktop in a sizable organization for at least a coupe of years.
Moreover, relatively few IS people have good working knowledge or expertise with Linux. Retraining them is from windows is still rather expensive and takes time. In addition, relatively few organizations are running Linux, overall, so the pool of expertise is limited. But you can cut this costs by implementing Unix utilities and several other parts of Unix environment (shell, gcc, Apache, perl, etc) in Windows environment as the first step of such migration.
Over time, TCO of supporting a Linux desktop might become gradually less as Linux penetrates deeper into the market. It has only been considered mainstream since 1999. New people are learning it all the time because the financial barrier to entry is so low. As the number of experts increase, the TCO will decrease.
Hmmm... I just type in "emerge kde". God I love gentoo...
Couldn't bear to sign in with your own account for that one, now could you PhysicsJackoff?
Slashdot has become this piece of shit site. Or let me rephrase that.
- first posts, yeah fun.
- lots of people who don't read stories post about the stories
- lame news articles like this one.
If you want some integrity, stop adding comments like this to your post. "Who really cares?". If nobody cares, why are you posting it?
No more. As of now, I'm not reading slashdot anymore regularly. I may visit it once in a while, if someone sends me a link, but I'm not reading it daily ever again. It's a waste of time really. I could be coding.
Ximian or not, everyone still uses XMMS. And why not spice that one up a bit with the kick-ass Ximian-South-skin which can be found here.
Look! I'm ONTOPIC so blow it out your ass.
Troll??? /me checks "Post Anonymously"
Moderators on crack!
suck it's own dick?
Answer:
Because it can.
The man has his enemies. In fact he is quite annoying.
I know. In fact, I have him marked down as an 'enemy'. But I've modded his post up here (hence the anonymous posting, so as not to cancel it out), because I genuinely don't think he was trolling in this instance, but offering something meaningful to the discussion.
Lucky me, for a Have you Meta Moderated recently? banner appeared in the front page of Slashdot. Guess I'll be seeing you shortly.