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Choosing Microsoft Products May Cost 10-40% More

securitas writes "Jupiter Research has issued a report that says businesses that choose to stay with Microsoft products may end up paying anywhere from 10%-40% more than if they chose another solution. Software Assurance clients will see the lowest costs and SA-have-nots will see the highest costs. The rationale is that Microsoft's strategy of integrating server and client software, as it has done with the new Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003 suite, will force costly upgrades and licenses. Ultimately the goal is to transform Office into a platform instead of a collection of applications. Analyst Joe Wilcox says, "Microsoft argues that increased integration will cut down ongoing costs, maintenance and what not, but whether that will be the case has yet to be seen. The increased acquisition costs, though, are pretty clear." This leaves the door open for other office suites like Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarOffice and OpenOffice. More on costs and integration at Jupiter/Wilcox's Microsoft Monitor Blog."

4 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. how Linux can beat M$ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Hi,

    I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual
    Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A-
    in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much
    power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use
    RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although
    I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been
    greatly impressed.

    This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with
    Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to
    help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will
    hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little
    effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows! :)

    To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat.
    Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the
    codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I
    know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems
    like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating
    system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could
    someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of
    Linux?

    Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I
    think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what
    keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into
    Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a
    long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that.
    Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for
    free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the
    code and putting a virus in every computer?

    On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My
    friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why
    Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.

    Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line.
    Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised
    that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is
    called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a future
    release?

    Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home
    without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office
    for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!

    Have a nice day! Go Linux!!

  2. The alternative is much worse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    $699 per CPU SCO licensing for Linux is much more expensive than any MS product. I'll stick with Windows, thank you.

  3. Re:seriously now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Tell me one good thing Microsoft has done in the past 2 to 3 years?

  4. Re:Yes but. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    :wtf: you're gay.

    I'll repeat that for you. You're gay. You're blaming performance problems on Linux, when in fact it is because of the hardware. You run XP on that 333 MHz K6 system with 64MB and tell me if it does a copy quickly.

    Hell, assume equal hardware when making your claims, dumbass.