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."

Comments

Re:Choosing Microsoft Products May Cost 10-40% Mor

[Osty]

Surely if a company went with all open source software going with Microsoft would cost them a literally infinite amount more?

I assume you're joking, however I'll still bite. You've made several bad assumptions:

• Open Source Software may be Free Software, but it's not always free (ie, no monetary cost).
• You're assuming a company's time is worth nothing. How much is it going to cost a company to hack together enough open source applications to get close to replacing all of Exchange's functionality (yes, there are tools that aim to replace Exchange, like Binari, but they're not free last I checked), and how much is it going to cost to maintain this ragtag solution? This is where "Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)" comes in. You have to measure everything from purchase price, to implementation costs, to maintenance costs and so on. Microsoft software may be more in the purchase price department compared to open source software, but if it's less in implementation costs or maintenance costs, its TCO will be lower.

RTA, it compares MS to MS

[rockhome]

The article is not about the cost difference between say Office and Open Office, but between the current pricing and software structure versus the future.

It would be ludicrous to use this articele as a vehicle to prove the viability of Star Office, say, versus Office. I find the description of this article very misleading. Any new generation/paradigm(is it a paradigm? I'll check Kuhn) can result in a rise in total cost of acquisition or even ownership.

This applies to any software, free or not. If PHP or HTTP were radically changed, would it not require significant investment to reintegrate old applications? IPv6, while necessary in the lon run will undoubetedly cause an initial cost of migration.

What are the costs of migrating from office to Open Office? What are the costs of then intregrating Open Office into the organization as tool for scheduling, data sharing, etc.?