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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."
No, you have to think of the TCO. Support, training, updates, IT staff, time spent, etc...
No solution is cost free.
FuckMicrosoft.com has the largest list of Microsoft-alternative software that I have ever seen.
This leaves the door open for other office suites like Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarOffice and OpenOffice.
IIRC, MS Office costs anywhere from 2 or 3 times, in the case of WP, to 00 (that should be an infinity, but two zeros side by side is the best I could do) times, in the case of OOo, as much as MS Office. To my recollection, MS Office has always cost lots more than its competitors, but plenty of people still buy it and plenty of people frown at the idea of a "work-alike" or whatever you want to call it. As much as I would like to see Corel, Sun and OOo eat MS's lunch on the office suite (and I think we are approaching that) there is lots of inertia to overcome.
Is it just me or do the slashdot editors post some story comparing the TCO of linux and something else EVERY DAY???
Isn't this a little excessive? Does it occur to anyone that the TCO of deployment for an OS might be different for different companies in different industries? Does it occur to them that one study doesn't answer the question with any finality at all?
All this inspires is the same worthless conversation about it with all the IT people (and 15 year olds who claim to be) arguing for and against linux and something else.
Why not real news?
Oh wait...this is slashdot...
Brian
we have heard it all... microsoft sucks but cant we put it in the title and move on???
"slashdot, News for nerds, Microsoft sucks" that becasue 80% of the news on slashdot is how much SCO or Microsoft is evil... I got it...BAD!!! make a microsoft section and dont make the MS BS appear on the front page anymore..
and no this isnt a troll... I really just am getting tired of it and dont see how everyone else isnt. I for one want more biotech, nanotech and hard science news... even if its not big news, it would be interesting which is what news is supposed to be, informative and interesting, and SCO and MS news is now neither...
just my $.02... but I know all of you think im right even if just a little bit..
Well, we just replaced 30 of our desktops at work with Debian.
Exchange was a bit of trouble of course, but we did get it solved. www.opengroupware.org.
Otherwise, our setup is pretty easy. OpenLDAP is our directory server... like AD, it hosts users/groups/otherstuff. Each desktop is configured to get account information from it.
Home directories are mounted over NFS.
Email is handled by Postfix, Cyrus IMAP. Two very easy packages.
OpenGroupware let use get teh Calendar/Contact stuff. We're using their Web Interface on Linux. We don't have a whole lot of shared stuff going on, so it's totally fine.
Outlook can connect to OGo with the ZideLOok plugin, which isn't free, obviously, as you have to license MAPI stuff.
ALl in all though, we came out better. Where it took me (the only IT employee except my boss) 100% of my time to just manage the windows workstations/servers, deploy patches, come in on weeks, etc, it's still just me... and im pretty bored most of the time. Other than the few windows workstations we have left (5?) nothing ever breaks... ever. At all.
Cost wise... we used Debian. It's monitarily free. All the packages are free. ZideLook set us back a bit for the 5 workstations... but overall it saves me enough time to be worth it.
Oh, we got our VB6 applications working too. I came up with an ingenious idea for this. Run them thru the VB7 conversion wizard. Patch them up a bit, and then run them on Mono. It actually WORKS.
I'd say, we spent... total on actual products, 400$.
Took me about a week of my time to learn all the packages. Now, I know im a smart person, but it took me over a month to fully understand AD to the same level I understand what we've set up now.
Oh, Samba 3.0 is authenticating with LDAP too... that services our domain needs.
You can log onto Unix, and your home directory is there... and then log onto windows, and behold H: is also your home directory.
Password synchronization was EASY. Samba 3.0 has it built in. 2.2 was a LOT harder (had to write a script, or download a script from the net).
OpenOffice for our office stuff. HEre we had a bit of a problem. We had some very complex spreadsheets running in Excel. I'm talking hundreds of macros. Insane stuff. THey're still running on the windows box. But this is ancient stuff, we really wanna rewrite it web based anyways...
Anyways, it's not as hard as people think. Overall it IS cheeper. It runs a lot better too.
Umm, not too long ago, most server systems ran a UNIX flavor. Migrating from an NT-based OS to a UNIX-like or a UNIX flavor wouldn't cost much in that arena. Plus you can get people with 30+ years of experience in UNIX systems... something MS can't compete with.
.com era MCSEs and IT people your company probably hired when it made the migration in the first place, but don't automatically assume it's more expensive for your support people to develop solutions for UNIX-flavor/like A versus New MS OS B. I'd imagine they'd be about the same in man-hours.
Most of your older support staff should be damned familiar with the systems and pick up something like Solaris, AIX, or Linux pretty damn quickly. Now, this doesn't factor in the
Prior Investment: you're absolutely correct here, except for the fact that MS produces notoriously buggy software that it EOLs after a few years. So a few years down the line and you have a security problem that will never be fixed, you're forced to upgrade, incurring all sorts of new costs in developing new procedures/etc. You also have Office interoperability, which breaks with each new version. Other vendors don't do this, IBM for example.
So, the basic question is, over how long do you want to calculate the TCO? In the short term, MS probably costs a lot less, in the long term, I would wager quite a bit that it costs one hell of a lot, as I can't assume they'll change their stripes.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
If anybody needs a clear demonstration of how one can manipulate people by using facts and footnotes, this article is it. Forget about reading Al Franken's book about the right-wing media, this lesson has been adopted all journalists.
Basically the argument boils down to this...
If you look at Office 2003 and see all the wonderful features touted, you may have to pay 10-40% more than previous Office products to take full advantage of all the features touted.
Pay careful attention to that phrase "features touted", as that's the key of this argument. The fact is you don't have to pay for integration if you don't want to use the features. You can continue to use Office with all the existing features it's ever had in a non-integrated fashion and paying about the same.
In fact this guy isn't even arguing that the competition offers the same features for less. They don't. They just assume you don't want them.
So somehow Microsoft is being dishonest in touting features of Office because they might involve integrating with extra server products.
Uhh, whatever.
I'm intelligent, I can look at products from multiple vendors, find out the system requirements to make the product perform the features they claim, and then add up the total cost.
This article is more manipulative and deceptive than Microsoft's marketing group.