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

Could

[tofubar]

That is, if you pay for them *nudge nudge wink wink*

Choosing Microsoft Products May Cost 10-40% More

[Sir Haxalot]

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

No surprises here

[henrygb]

1. Microsoft raises licence prices
2. Consumers who use Microsoft have to pay more

The logic is impressive.

Re:No surprises here

[quigonn]

Hey, you left out the actual numbers 2 and 3 from the "1, 2, 3, 4 profit!" formula!

Re:No surprises here

[Jameth]

Actually, they aren't raising all their license costs. As I recall, server 2003 cut its license cost to fall in before the RedHat enterprise edition which offers phone support.

Some prices go up, some stay with inflation, and some go down.

The costs they are noting are due to forced upgrades, not more expensive licenses.

Re:No surprises here

[JHromadka]

What about AppleWorks? Oh who am I kidding. :)

Re:No surprises here

[dipipanone]

Which is almost as bizzare as talking to yourself.

Re:No surprises here

[Cy Guy]

1. Microsoft raises licence prices
2. Consumers who use Microsoft have to pay more ...
3. PROFIT!

(For MS, anyway)

haven't "used" MS for a while

[GerbilSocks]

This is the exact reason why my computer still runs Windows 3.11.

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

[Streiff]

The purchase price is just one part of TCO.

topic

[TedCheshireAcad]

Choosing Microsoft Products May Cost 10-40% More

Really. Did they figure that one out themselves or do they have a team of monkeys working on this around the clock?

Re:topic

[UnknowingFool]

I would bet a team of 1000 monkeys on 1000 calculators figured it out. It's a pretty good team. They did my taxes last year. The IRS didn't penalize me as much as they did last year.

Re:topic

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Did they figure that one out themselves or do they have a team of monkeys working on this around the clock?

Normally I wouldn't bring this up but if you're going to put a copyright notice in your sig you should credit where the above came from.

Kevin Spacey...The Usual Suspects....

Re:topic

[TedCheshireAcad]

No....

Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney) said it.

I can put you in Queens on the night of the robbery.
Really. I live in Queens. Did you figure that out yourself or do you have a team of monkeys working on this around the clock?

It's not surprising...

[petermdodge]

... company has monopoly. Company has losts of customers. Company sees sagging bottom line. Company raises prices.

The next step? Company doesn't have as many customers.

Re:It's not surprising...

[buffer-overflowed]

Monopoly:
n 1: (economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller; "a monopoly on silver"; "when you have a monopoly you can ask any price you like"

Nice try though. A real monopoly can charge whatever the hell they like and your only choice is simply not to use it. I don't think a lot of companies are going to stop using Computers.

Re:It's not surprising...

[El]

A corrolary to this is that most people don't seem to realize that by providing a viable alternative, Open Source benefits even those customers that choose to continue using Microsoft software. Competition is good, it forces companies to aggressive improve their products and lower costs in ways that actually benefit the consumer.

Re:It's not surprising...

[bKT*]

Well; I don't think Microsoft needs to worry about customers; or else they would be doing this would they? Apparently they believe that they have enough customers that will pay out of their wallet rather than change over to another system.
Fact is, more people would pay more for something they know how to use than pay less for something they've never used before.

ah, yes

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Just go down to the Free Admin Depot and pick up some guys to run it all?

Re:ah, yes

[TedCheshireAcad]

Pretty much.

Re:ah, yes

[tuba_dude]

I would go to the FAD, but it's full of yuppies, and all they offer are MSCEs.

Re:ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

To hell with Free Admin Depot, just get one of the gnu hippies out of his parent's basement. The sunshine would do him good.

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

[spitefulcrow]

That's assuming they download every single piece of software from the project sites and order no distributions of Linux, etc. from large companies like Red Hat or Mandrake.

Oh dear..

[rylin]

It "May" cost more.. hurrah! \o/
In all fairness, it probably will end up costing more... until you need support.
MCSEs (yes, they do know how to fix common issues with MS platforms) are a dime a dozen.
Can you say the same about support for other platforms?

Re:Oh dear..

[shnarez]

MCSEs (yes, they do know how to fix common issues with MS platforms) are a dime a dozen.

...and they're each worth roughly $0.10/12, as you said.

Re:Oh dear..

[cduffy]

yah, but finding people who know how to fix uncommon issues is a different thing.

Hire a good senior Unix sysadmin, and more than half the time you'll have someone who's also part systems-level programmer, part integration engineer, part deployment engineer, part revision control specialist, part... well, you get the idea. At my workplace the senior sysad is writing some in-house web-based user management software for HR, setting up several other departments with Plone-based intranet portals, and finishing the spit-and-polish on the automatic installation procedure he set up (grab a new machine, throw a CD in the drive and an ethernet connection in the back, turn it on, walk away for 20 minutes, and it's installed with all the software we use and configured for our network). He's showed up our Oracle DBA with regards to deep understanding why raw partitions are a useful feature (this included an in-depth discussion of the kernel's I/O elevator algorithm), personally wrote the drivers for the CD jukebox that was offered us for backup storage, is working on an embedded operating system in his spare time, and is otherwise a flat-out badass.

I'm currently the primary deployment engineer; I also sometimes serve as junior sysad (and was primary sysad before this guy was hired). A few days ago I wrote some in-house crypto-enabled backup software such that the business-type responsible for transporting materials to our off-site vault could burn their own CDs with our revision-control repository -- encrypted such that even should the CD (or the ISO it's burned from) be captured, there's no actual risk of data theft. Right now I'm at work (on a weekend) rewriting some integration code one of the application developers generated. I wrote the applet we use in-house for displaying the amount of time on a user's Kerberos ticket; In my spare time I also maintain some Free Software (which aforementioned lead sysadmin originally wrote) for converting CVS repositories to Arch format.

I've dealt with senior Windows sysad types on occasion -- and while they may be cheap, most of them don't have half the range of skills a good UNIX admin has. Hell, not even close to half.

I'll take good support at $.25 a dozen over someone who knows how to say "okay, reboot your machine... okay, we'll need to reinstall the OS" for $.10. (Further, given present economic conditions, Unix folks are much cheaper than was the case a few years ago -- indeed, if yer willing to deal with the new kids who just do Linux, I'd expect them to start getting cheaper than MCSEs real soon now... though you might not get quite the same range of skills and experience as the old UNIX longhairs in that case).

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

[Joe U]

No, you have to think of the TCO. Support, training, updates, IT staff, time spent, etc...

No solution is cost free.

Information on alternatives.

[dripwipeflush]

FuckMicrosoft.com has the largest list of Microsoft-alternative software that I have ever seen.

Re:Information on alternatives.

[maliabu]

i think poeple should choose a more friendly domain name if they want to provide an alternative.

i'm not saying that the above domain name is false or unreasonable, but most people would search "microsoft alternative" instead of "microsoft sucks" in google.com.

Re:Information on alternatives.

[GigsVT]

Hah, funny, I'm wearing a fuckmicrosoft.com T-shirt right now. I found them on a random Google search.

The only problem with it is that on the back it says

"Free your mind,
and your OS will follow"

The comma is right over the "OS" part. So people always ask me "your O's will follow? What??"

Pretty funny.

Re:Information on alternatives.

[kasperd]

i think poeple should choose a more friendly domain name if they want to provide an alternative.

If you read the page, you would know, they already have a more friendly name.

Re:Yes but.

[hattig]

because cp filename newfilename takes 20 minutes?

faster than "click on My Computer, Navigate to file, select file, press ctrl-c or right-click and select copy from menu, then navigate to new location and press ctrl-v or right click and select paste from menu"

Not exactly news, is it?

[apoplectic]

"Microsoft products may end up paying anywhere from 10%-40% more than if they chose another solution" but..."Microsoft argues that increased integration will cut down ongoing costs... but whether that will be the case has yet to be seen." Uh, like the 10%-40% increase has yet to be seen. It MAY cost more, but it MAY cost less!!!

Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[Shivetya]

There are other costs associated with software than the upfront cost paid. This article does not account for those costs. Second, for those under SA you don't see the big costs of upgrading.

Costs that come up when switch.
Testing (QA) on the new product, mainly to help develop some means of support across the organization; ie standards. You also have to determine the best install of the package and how to deliver it. (is it easy to push?)

Training. Sure it might LOOK like package X. The key is finding the quirks that generate support calls and find solutions.

Prior investment. If it works, its even cheaper to not upgrade and keep the old stuff.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[azaris]

Prior investment. If it works, its even cheaper to not upgrade and keep the old stuff.

Some companies overdo this and when the upgrade time finally comes (let's face it, eventually all software will become obsolete - if not before then at least when any hardware left running it becomes scrap metal), they incur higher costs than if they'd upgraded earlier because now they have to replan their entire architecture and most if not all of their old skills and processes are completely obsolete.

So I don't think it's a simple question of "don't upgrade until you have to".

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[romanval]

Yah, but a good thing about using open source is that the training is a one time cost rather then an ongoing expense every 3 years or so.

In fact, you could replace componates independantly of each other.. Upgrading the kernel while keeping the same office suite.

FOSS change tend to be more evolutionary rather then a total featureset/UI overhaul.

My only quibble about FOSS is that many of it's UI design influences is clearly taken from Windows, which by itself is designed pretty horribly.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Costs that come up when switch.

All true, even though staying on one particular version might not be a viable option sometimes. If you use a suite of packages, perhaps you can maintain interoperability only by keeping them all at similar versions. The manufacturer might force you to upgrade some components to a higher version, by dropping support or stopping the release of security patches for older versions. You may find that by being forced to upgrade a few components, you'll be forced to upgrade everything.

The cost of switching software is daunting, not in the least since your users and support team will have to build up knowledge of the new software. But, as a certain CIO put it, "Switching from MS to something else may be a big hassle, but Microsoft are making it more and more attractive for us!".

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[buffer-overflowed]

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.

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 .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.

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.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[Coryoth]

Yes, it costs to switch to other products, but that is a perfectly double edged sword. If a new business sets up with Linux desktops running OpenOffice, then it will cost to switch to some MS solution.

The cost of initially setting up the system is pretty similar for either side really.

Claims of costs to switch are, largely, irrelevant to a survey about business deciding which system to go with.

Jedidiah

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[CmdrTacoButt]

Don't fool yourself. Upgrading MS's own products can be just as much of a hassle as any platform migration. Less even, if you consider being able to fix your own issues a valuable time saver.

In order to move to Office 2003/Server 2003 Combination - it will require some amount of conversion of your existing documents. As does switching to StarOffice/OpenOffice. Complex documents are going to have conversion issues just as they would in OpenOffice, though maybe to a lesser degree because MS understand their document format better. Well, maybe not.

This 2003 platform is not going to magically figure out how to route documents or set rights management. The real question for businesses is whether they want to commit to the new 2003 integrated office platform to build new applications and workflow with - because that is where any platform advantage would be seen. Businesses must weight the risks of investing time/money and data into this new MS scheme and the potential that MS could extort more dollars from them in the future (no - they'd never do that - right?).

I see this coming down to 2 camps of thought - those that like the MS integrated environment (and always have). They believe that MS deserves the money it earns and are glad to hand over their hard earned dollars every year. The other are businesses that have been burned by MS in the past, are sceptical of their business tactics, or don't see the need for this highly integrated Office Platform. The first camp will choose MS regardless, so it's futile even persuing them. The second camp would be good candidates for non-MS products (and may already be using them in the form of Lotus or Corel products). The real trick is making sure they know that there are alternatives to MS's Office 2003 platform - before they are shoehorned into it by MS resellers/partners.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[DaveHowe]

This is of course true - however, I also lived though the reverse transform (the move from central unix-based servers to windows) and the MS pitch there was on how easy it was to learn the new systems, and that the cost was much less than the saving from dropping all those expensive Unix boxes.
KDE or Gnome isn't much if any harder to learn than windows was, and indeed the transition windows>>xwindows should be much "cheaper" than unix>>windows and yet the savings to be had are much greater...

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[C10H14N2]

A company I worked for a few years back finally migrated from Lotus to MS for their general office apps. It cost in the neighborhood of $15,000 (not including the admin overhead of the project) just to convert one document collection of just a few hundred files to Word from AmiPro, since many of them were full of necessary macros. Rolling out over the entire organization would easily exceed $1M in document conversion costs alone.

The primary concern for such general applications is the lack of training necessary for both existing users and new hires. In that particular case, new hires for five years or more were not coming to the job with knowledge of SmartSuite. Considering the total cost of training 1000 employees for as little as one day each easily exceeds $1M and often to several times as much no matter how you structure the training, such a move made sense even in the relatively short-term.

A move to OpenOffice in such an organization would entail the same conversion cost, the same ongoing training cost over the forseeable future as well as instantaneously over the entire organization, vastly dwarfing any licensing and administrative costs of ownership. Unfortunately, in any large organization, you can't expect thousands of people to just buck-up and wing it with unfamiliar applications and still have a functioning business.

That said, the same organization began the migration process just before Microsoft rolled-out its new and improved subscription licensing, causing a great deal of bad-blood and talk of formally giving them the finger and going back to Lotus or IBM Selectrics if necesary.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[Coryoth]

A move to OpenOffice in such an organization would entail the same conversion cost, the same ongoing training cost over the forseeable future as well as instantaneously over the entire organization, vastly dwarfing any licensing and administrative costs of ownership.

I think the theory with OpenOffice would be: If you ever have to do another conversion to a new system later, it will be much easier if you've used open, well documented file formats (and presuming you're switching to something with open, well documented file formats). Avoiding the lockin is the key, in theory. whether that's enough incentive in practice is another question.

Jedidiah

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[C10H14N2]

Really, at roughly fifty-cents per day, MS Office SPLA fees cost less per employee than the coffee service. You don't even need to get into file conversion costs before it becomes a huge financial risk to switch from anything to anything when user familiarity is at issue. However, as soon as file conversion does become an issue, the cost of converting a single document exceeds the per-user cost per month of the SPLA.

Ugh. I'd love to see everyone move far, far away from Microsoft and start using OpenOffice. I dread the almost daily email containing "can you send that to me in [my favorite version of] Word?" Damn it, now I have to reboot or switch machines, then make sure everything still looks all perty in the latest version of F@$%ing Word because some schmuck can't open a PDF, RTF or Word9x file without having a tantrum. Sadly, large come huge companies just aren't going to risk hundreds to thousands of crying employees sucking up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they're not comfortable with new applications or, indeed, just selecting a different format on the handy drop-down box that might not let you embed every other conceivable piece of trash on the desktop in the document, but works perfectly well enough anyway. Sigh.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[SpaceCadetTrav]

As an employee in a fortune 500 company, I've noticed that admins with 30 years of unix experience seem to be about 15 years behind the rest of the world. Sad but true.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[mpe]

Costs that come up when switch.
Testing (QA) on the new product, mainly to help develop some means of support across the organization; ie standards. You also have to determine the best install of the package and how to deliver it. (is it easy to push?)

One thing to remember is that if you "stick with" Microsoft you effectivly have to "switch" every couple of years anyway.

Training. Sure it might LOOK like package X. The key is finding the quirks that generate support calls and find solutions.

"It" could well be office 2003 against Office 2000 or Office XP.

Prior investment. If it works, its even cheaper to not upgrade and keep the old stuff.

Considerably easier with an open source system where support is always possible, than with a proprietary system which may have been EOLed or require as part of your licence to always use the latest version.

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[mpe]

Prior Investment: you're absolutely correct here, except for the fact that MS produces notoriously buggy software that it EOLs after a few years.

Possibly this means in practice that it gets discontinued just as you are getting on top of its quirks :)

Re:Ignores cost of switching to other products.

[ivan256]

Testing (QA) on the new product, mainly to help develop some means of support across the organization; ie standards.

That's a joke, right? You do test the software you're "upgrading" to just as much as the software you may migrate to, right?

Training. Sure it might LOOK like package X. The key is finding the quirks that generate support calls and find solutions.

Sounds similar to the situations you'll encounter switching from Windows 2000 to XP.

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.

so how much saved by staying put?

[romanval]

I mean, if you think of software as only needing x amount of functionality in the first place, with little or no noticable productivity gains seen from upgradeing to the next major version, the question will pop up; Why upgrade at all?

Re:so how much saved by staying put?

[B5_geek]

I work for Canon. We are running Windows95 on P2-300's everywhere.

We have just started upgrading these boxes to Win2000.

I'd day we saved a lot of money by waiting, but it has also cost us MORE THEN $1million for licensing & etc. before we rolled out 1 box.

Re:so how much saved by staying put?

[romanval]

Exactly, but when the licensing charge hits you that hard, you might as well look into spending that $ into switching to a FOSS solution instead.

Re:so how much saved by staying put?

[El]

Especially since the costs of retraining all users far exceeds the cost of even Microsoft software, especially when you take into account lost productivity, etc. while people are coming up to speed. IIRC, it cost corporations about $2000 PER USER to upgrade from Win95 to Win98 (Sorry I don't have any more recent figures, does anybody else have cost estimates e.g. for moving from Win2K to XP?) Other factors: 1) You probably have to buy new hardware if your hardware is more than 3 years old, because chances are the hardware is no longer being sold, therefore why would the manufacturer bother to write drivers for the new OS? 2) M$ seems bound and determined to switch from an economic model wherein software is purchased to one where it is effectively rented. Upgrading forces you to accept their new terms.

On the other hand, since most of your users have probably lost the licenses that came with their PCs, upgrading will make you less susceptible to a BSA audit.

Re:so how much saved by staying put?

[pjrc]

Why upgrade at all?

Because you can't add new machines and buy the same old programs for them. So if you hire anymore people and want them to have the same software as everyone else, there is really no choice.

In fact, with OEM licensing (what's included with all new PCs and most common for less than 500 employees), you can't even upgrade the hardware and reuse the OEM copy of windows and office that was purchased previously. So even if you don't add any more people requiring more machines... if you add some other application and it has system requirements beyond the old machines that happily run older but fully functional Office97, then you are compelled to repurchase Microsoft Office for the upgrade, and of course you can't get the old version. And if you want to have the same version on everyone's desktop.....

But if you choose Redhat8 with OpenOffice 1.0, and you wanted a new machine with the same thing as all your others, you can forever "buy" the same thing. And the price is 100% less too!

Re:so how much saved by staying put?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

On the other hand, since most of your users have probably lost the licenses that came with their PCs, upgrading will make you less susceptible to a BSA audit.

Certainly the BSA is evil, sick, and wrong, but...

Why would you let the users be responsible for keeping track of their own licensing info? We have a FTE who maintains our licensing database. With 5,000 users scattered across seven offices, we need to be certain we're in compliance, and having one guy whose only job is to make sure it works turned out to be our best option.

MS apologists -- On your marks! Get set!

[1010011010]

Troll!

Re:MS apologists -- On your marks! Get set!

[1010011010]

Moderation
50% Troll
30% Funny
20% Insightful

... maybe that should have been "MS apologists -- On your marks! Get set! Moderate!"

You need to read the links to recognise the bias..

[Osrin]

"means some enterprises may end up paying 10 to 40 percent more" some... may... does not equal "issued a report that says businesses that choose to stay with Microsoft products may end up paying anywhere from 10%-40% more" The research is a little flawed, it makes no comparison of features or the benefits that come with the MS server products (good or bad, the data needs to be there). This is GREAT data for any enterprise that is using it's office suite for word processing... but there are not many of those, most are doing a little extra work with the software that they purchase.

Speaking of Openoffice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to check out the recently released OpenOffice.org 1.1. Unlike previous versions of OpenOffice.org, it has wonderful font handling, looks like a native application, improved office file formats support, and most importantly, it's FAST. Now it only takes about 4 seconds to load on my machine, compared to around 30 for 1.0. Download it now.

Windows Version
Linux version
Other versions

Re:Speaking of OpenOffice.

[Animats]

Yes, OpenOffice is finally becoming a reasonable desktop suite. It's not elegant, but it's workable. Import of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents usually work. HTML editing is possible, but marginal. The presentation generator is OK. The draw program is useful for drawing charts with boxes and arrows. Microsoft makes you buy Visio to do that.

Early versions were awful. Remember the "StarOffice Desktop"? But it is getting better.

One major weak point typifies what's wrong with open source software. The document templates are sparse and aesthetically poor. What makes PowerPoint successful are all those canned presentations busy executives can modify. OpenOffice Impress has nothing like that.

Usability testing remains weak. Sun did a small usability test of StarOffice in 2000, but activity since then has been sparse.

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

[grozzie2]

The hardware on which it runs is part of the Total Cost of Ownership. Assuming the same baseline underlying hardware, there is a cost of ownership bar on which both solutions begin. The hardware itself is a fixed cost, before any software is considered.

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

[oogoliegoogolie]

You're making a funny, right? Only if the open source software is free. And then the purchase price of software is only one factor in the ultimate price-there is support, IT, training, hardware. After you consider all the costs then purchase price probably is one of the smaller costs.

Shocking!!

[Dr. Photo]

I for one am shocked by these figures.

10-40% is far too low to be plausible. ;)

Too bad things won't change quickly.

[El Cubano]

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.

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[NanoGator]

" To my recollection, MS Office has always cost lots more than its competitors,"

To be fair, I have yet to see a mail client that does all the stuff that Outlook does. I agree that you have your work-alike people (who probably aren't aware of the extra stuff Outlook can do), but there are also the people who are buying the right tool for the job.

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[skaffen42]

To be fair, I have yet to see a mail client that does all the stuff that Outlook does.

Yes, it'll enable you to run pretty much any e-mail virus without any compatibility problems. Non of the alternatives come even close. :)

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[NanoGator]

"Yes, it'll enable you to run pretty much any e-mail virus without any compatibility problems. Non of the alternatives come even close. :) "

Maybe. Though I cannot attest to that as that hasn't happened to me in the 3 years I've used it. (I don't use its default settings tho, so you can have that.)

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I work with Outlook, and it's not the right tool for any job."

Makes one wonder why alternatives to Outlook haven't been adopted like wildfire, doesn't it. Of course, everybody is quick to rule out the idea that there are important things that haven't been duplicated yet.

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[Brandybuck]

I'm guessing that it's because the people that need the Outlook feature set are precisely those people that won't ever consider anything but Microsoft. You know, the people that will send your jobs overseas to save money, but mandate Outlook/Exchange even though they can easily get by with something else that's cheaper or even free.

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[Brandybuck]

They're simply the decision makers. CEOs, CTOs, CIOs. They assume that their personal needs are duplicated across the corporation. In my company we replaced a working Netscape server with Exchange SOLELY because Netscape Calendar didn't have the feature set of Outlook Calendar. The new Exchange server is down for "maintenance" about once a week. They replaced five UNIX sysadmins with fifty MCSEs. Ain't progress wonderful?

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[0x0d0a]

That's not necessarily what he said. He didn't say it was lacking features that were specifically required, just that it didn't have the feature set. It may be that someone wanted flexibility to use some not-currently-used-feature in the future.

Frankly, asking product A to literally do everything product B does -- a perfect feature superset -- is crazy, when it comes to apps the size of what we're talking about. I'll settle for needing to use a different approach to particular problems, as long as the app reproduces all the important features on way or another.

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[mcrbids]

To be fair, I have yet to see a mail client that does all the stuff that Outlook does.

Yes, it'll enable you to run pretty much any e-mail virus without any compatibility problems. Non of the alternatives come even close. :)

Jokes aside, OE is a pretty decent email program. I haven't used Evolution, but I've seen Kmail (KDE Mail) and I've been using it for years.

It's integration with Konqueror means that most attachments work out of the gate with little hassle - though I enjoy all the virus executables! (good luck, Klez!)

The best one for KMail users was the Klez, since it sent documents usually openable in OO. It was like Forest Gump's box of chocolates... you'd never know what you'd get, except that it would NOT be a virus. (on your Linux system)

Re:Too bad things won't change quickly.

[JamieF]

>To my recollection, MS Office has always cost lots more than its competitors

You recollect incorrect[ly]. :)

When Microsoft Office was the underdog, it cost less than the market leader (WordPerfect Office). Only now that Word is the de facto standard, and inertia is on Microsoft's side, have they started to jack up their prices, and of course their competitors have to price their products lower in order to have a hope of getting anyone's attention. (Would you buy a word processor that costs more than Word, but lacked its functionality and wasn't compatible with the file format?)

Re:IM HIGH ON DXM

[junkgui]

I hope jupiter reserch does a study on gentoo users and thier higher then average OTC drug use.

Please, PLEASE can we lost the TCO stories?

[zorander]

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

Re:Please, PLEASE can we lost the TCO stories?

[antiMStroll]

Relax, it's just you.

Oh wait...this is slashdot...

Indeed.

Re:Please, PLEASE can we lost the TCO stories?

[JamieF]

>And I, for one, am much more fed up about people who
>complain about things instead of working to make things better.

Exactly! They should spend their time moderating stories... oh wait. /. doesn't let you moderate stories.

Any old crap gets posted, but there's no way to moderate the crappy stories and give the editors the finger when they post a crappy story without reading the article / a spoiler from hell / a "breaking news" story that's a duplicate of an article that was posted 2 months ago ON SLASHDOT. All we can do is complain, or run away. I guess you would prefer that we just slink away quietly and leave the reading of crappy duplicate stories to ACs like you?

Re:Please, PLEASE can we lost the TCO stories?

[4of12]

/. doesn't let you moderate stories.

Indirectly, it does.

If you look closely at the bottom of the story you'll see something like:

Read more ... | 19 of 87

Bigger numbers mean more popular stories and larger ratios of the first to the second number mean more readable posts.

Slash wish list:

• a graphical sidebar with recent stories ranked by popularity by total number of comment posts,
• recent stories ranked by median Score of posts.

Re:Please, PLEASE can we lost the TCO stories?

[JamieF]

Aw whatever. More replies just mean that the topic impinged upon an existing religious war. /. stories are really just substrates for tired old usenet flame wars to make their way into the new age of forums and weblogs.

Integration cuts costs?

[oogoliegoogolie]

"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...

Yeah, like how integration of IE into windows OS has cut down on maintenance costs.

Re:Integration cuts costs?

[El]

Obviously, you understood M$ -- integration cuts down on Microsoft's maintenance costs. They never said anything about passing those savings on to the consumer!

acquisition

[satsuke]

"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."

Perhaps microsoft needs to usurp & change another dictionary word,. like the apparent change of acquisition from a word meaning to aquire ,. as in implied ownership.

To a new usage defined closer to "toll, some thing paid each and every time used."

Last time I checked, if you purchased 100 copies of WordPerfect( software anymore. While the issue of updates is a valid one .. as in a company can justifibly stop supporting patching for a version past a certain point .. if you have to pay every year or lose the ability to safely use a piece of software than you are not getting anything lasting for your money.

These are all obvious facts ,. but not necessarily to small business or some corporate purchasers .. like the fact that at some places ,.unless it's written into the contract explicitly ,. you have to "purchase" a copy of windows with the PC and than "purchase" the right to use that software over and over again

Re:acquisition

[kfg]

These are all obvious facts ,. but not necessarily to small business or some corporate purchasers .

I can't speak for the corporate buyer as in the corporate enviroment I've only been a plebe or a Director, but as a small businessman I find these facts painfully obvious. If every dollar spent comes directly out of your wallet it tends to sharpen the mind.

If it doesn't you really shouldn't be running a small business.

I've posted it before. I'll post it again. Since switching to Linux several years ago I havn't spent one dime on software for my business. Not one extra dime on hardware ( and saved several by stepping off the upgrade cycle) and not one dime in training I wouldn't have had to do anyway in a Windows enviroment.

I've saved everything it would have cost me to insure license compliance ( just keeping track of license keys, even for just a few computers, was pain and time wasting), I havn't spent one dime on support (I only spent a couple hundred on Microsoft support before I realized that paying money to have someone tell me to reinstall was a pointless exercise for me). My entire system and all of its apps, including all the development tools I've ever needed, fits on two CDs which I can use on every computer, saving me I can't tell you how much time (it's less than it might be, because I don't have to reinstall everything as periodic "maintainence").

It has cost me not one dime to use Linux.

TCO has been the cost of my hardware and few books.

My wallet is much happier than it used to be.

I have given up no functionallity. I'm smart enough to ask "how do I" instead of "where's {blank} app." (Although I'm willing to admit that the answer could be "Get a Mac" if I asked "How do I" to certain things).

But more to the point, the real value that I've found running Linux is knowing that the system and all the data on it is transparently mine.

Since my business is now essentially my data files the "value" of that alone is the value of my business.

KFG

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

[Doomdark]

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

Only assuming that there are no other costs to software than purchase price. In general support needed by users (for IT depts), training (if any) needed for using tools, time needed to learn tools (OS or non-OS), all have associated costs. And in these areas, open source solutions have costs too, even if there's no sticker price.

seriously now

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Who's going to take the fall for this one?

[overbyj]

I wonder who at Jupiter Research will get canned for this report. Surely MS has some pull somewhere to get the author of this blasphemous report fired.

10-40% higher than PREVIOUS MS SOLUTIONS

[mcc]

If you look at the actual article, they note that "Wilcox estimates that firms taking Microsoft up on its offer to integrate back-end processes with front-end client software on the desktop may run up tabs 10 to 40 percent higher than with earlier editions of Microsoft's products, depending on the server licenses and client access licenses (CALs) they purchase. "

That is all. This is not a comparison against Linux, Macintosh or whatever competing Office suites may be left. This is simply an alalysis of how Microsoft's vendor lock-in--- umm, i mean, how the vertical integration of Microsoft's products affects the amount that companies will pay to use those products.

Isn't it grand how monopolies lower prices for consumers because they're more Efficient? Ahhh.

Re:10-40% higher than PREVIOUS MS SOLUTIONS

[Tokerat]

So basically what you're saying is that when comparing Microsoft to Microsoft, Linux still wins? God, we rule. :-)

Re:10-40% higher than PREVIOUS MS SOLUTIONS

[be-fan]

w00t!

Re:10-40% higher than PREVIOUS MS SOLUTIONS

[volkris]

you should emphasize artifical monopolies.

This isn't a case where a company is a monopoly because it happens to make a good product that others can't also make, it's a case where the government dictates that others can't make the product.

you know what ticks me off

[the_2nd_coming]

that if I want to have a windows XP based Media Center PC, I have to buy the over priced crap from computer makers. I could get a bunch or good hardware together for 400 bucks, but the lowest POS is 899 and does not include a DVD-+R/RW

(of course, mu price would include canabalised hardware liek a case and Proc, and a hard drive. but damn-it, I want to frigen have the same thing.....)

oh well, I guess I will ahve to use this

to bad mythTV and Freevo do not have a ready to install Linux solution, that would make them a kick ass option. to much work to get them working right now.

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

[wasabii]

Or just install Debian, which has everything prepackaged... and incedently is free too.

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

[Eudial]

X=OS product
Y=Microsoft product

X * (inf) = Y

Re:Yes but.

[UnknowingFool]

On the same note, it takes about 15 minutes for a sysadmin to run Windows Update on each machine in a Windows network every week. For an office of 100 machines that's 25 hours of admin time x $15/hr. $375 a week just to keep Windows up to date. But that's just one figure. It doesn't really mean anything until you take a look a the bigger picture in which case Linux wins on the TCO argument.

Departmental Savings

[ljavelin]

I can't speak for my entire organization, but I can speak for my department of 20 people.

We've made the switch away from Microsoft. About 2/3 of us use RH9; the other 1/3rd use Mac OS X. I'm one of the linux guys.

In a nutshell, we've managed (with some pain) to completely unload Microsoft. Pretty good, eh?

Our primary Office products are Open Office and Mozilla (for Web & Email).

Needless to say, we are an IT-centric organization, so we can take care of ourselves pretty well. In addition, our organization never standardized on the "viral" Microsoft practices, namely "MS-Exchange".

The savings? Well, for starters, there is the fee for Microsoft Office for 20 people. Plus we were able to get rid of our IT support guy (he was a contractor - we paid about $50k/year for his services - VERY PART TIME).

That's all pretty substantial $$$ - and it's money that flows right out the door.

The downside? Well, none really. It was difficult at first - we had a bunch of older docs in Visio and PPT 2000 format and stuff like that.

Now we have one PC in the office just for Windows.

It's kind like the old days when you had an unused microfiche machine in the back room.

Re:Departmental Savings

[El]

But, what about all the money you saved by not paying overtime to fight all the latest worms/virii, and savings by not losing productivity due to said worms bringing down your exchange server? Come on, if you're going to point out the advantages, point out ALL the advantages!

Re:Departmental Savings

[EvilStein]

Dunno if there is any money saved - some of us were stuck on salary when Code Red & Nimda & $HOLE_DU_JOUR was r00ting Windows servers. No overtime for us. =/

Re:Departmental Savings

[Blackknight]

Sounds just like our office.

We have one Windows PC which doesn't get used that much. Everybody else is using Redhat or Gentoo on their workstations.

We don't do much office stuff, but when we do we use Open Office, even on the windows box.

SA clients better off?

[damas]

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Half an year from now, Microsoft pulls out of the hat a new Office (replace with OS, Visual Studio etc. as needed) due to peer/boss/underling pressure the net-admins/IT officers/whatchucallemthings has to do an upgrade - because upgrades are free - almost, aren't they? Sooner, rather than later and certainly sooner than they would choose to (if win98 was stable would you have upgraded? - mine worked fine enough). So you sweep the cost of the upgrade, time, hardware - 'cause you have to change some, you didn't think it would behave on your old hardware, did you? - under the rug, grind your teeth to the gums, and do the upgrade - welcome the brave new world - no stabler, no cleaner, no faster than before, and yet still an all out eye sore.

Better off without, I reckon!

Re:Yes but.

[ultrabot]

Yes just as fast as sayyyyyyyyyyyy

xcopy filename newfilename


Actually, on equal hardware, dealing with files is faster on Linux. Linux does the caching thing a lot better than other systems. I ran a simple benchmark (random access writes/reads on a large file) w/ Linux, Windows and HP-UX. Linux was 30 times faster than Windows. HP-UX was as slow as windows. And the Linux machine had the slowest CPU and disk.

Yes mr admin you are ssssssssoooo smart with your cp command.

Yeah, 'cp' is pretty much rocket science to you MSFT fanboys.

When ALL you know is one thing do not asume others do not know how to do it better somewhere else...

"Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reimplement it, poorly"

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

TCO is dead. Long live ROI!

Re:Yes but.

[Billly Gates]

Not to sound trollish but according to the FBI Sendmail and Apache are right behind IIS/Exchange under security exploits.

Unix in general has horrible security and its just happens to be better then Windows.

Anyway you need to patch Unix boxes almost as often. Inet and xinet as well have some holes in it. I recommend FreeBSD over Linux for this reason since its port based and patching without dependancy problems is alot easier.

The real question is how often do Linux machines need to be patched vs Windows machines?

My guess is if you run something like sendmail, its just about as often.

Re:Yes but.

[kfg]

Did anybody ever mention to you that if your premises are false your conclusion is false, even if the logical steps are flawless?

Leaving aside, for the moment the ludicrous time parameters you use I'd point out the more subtle idea that not all hours are created equal.

You are not worth $12 and hour. You are only provisionally worth $12 an hour under certain limited conditions.

I would posit that if it takes you more than 5 minutes to copy a file on Linux more than once you never manage to meet those conditions at all.

At least if the money were coming out of my pocket.

KFG

Re:Could it be that you get what you pay for?

[Krandor3]

Open source does that to Microsoft not because Microsoft is better but because they are the dominate platform right now. To compete they have to be compatable. If I tell my company they should switch to openoffice and they cannot share files with their partner company that uses Microsoft Office, it is a non-starter not because Microsoft is better but becaause it is the most widely used and you have to have compatability with it.

Re:Yes but.

[LurkerXXX]

Unless your Windows admin is not an idiot. Only a Linux admin on a windows network would make this mistake. A Windows admin will use SUSadmin to roll out windows updates to all his machines from a server every day. Check off the updates you want to roll out, and your done.

A lot of this MS vs Linux bashing is done by folks incompetent at the other system. Either Linux, BSDs, or Windows machines can be run efficiently by a good admin who knows the system, or totally abysmally by someone who doesn't. ROI on your network relies MUCH more on the admin you hire than most folks will admit.

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

[Eudial]

Well, in the case of foo*0=5, foo has to be inf.

Prices in Britain

[norite]

(Prices from amazon.co.uk, in pounds sterling, where 1 pound ~ US$1.63)

Microsoft Ex Pee Home Edition (Upgrade): 84.49 quid
Microsoft Ex Pee Home edition (Full): 163.30 quid
Microsoft Ex Pee Professional Edition (Upgrade): 168.99 quid
Microsoft Ex Pee Professional Edition (Full): 251.99 quid
Microsoft Ex Pee Office (Standard): 333.99 quid
Microsoft Ex Pee Office (Professional): 397.99 quid

A boxed version of SuSE Linux costs about 60 quid for the PRO version, and about 30 quid for the home version. Of course, you can get it for free, same for OpenOffice. As a home user, I cringe to think what companies (and governments, with taxpayers money) are paying out in license fees for MS software.

Re:Prices in Britain

[norite]

Well, you're obviously too thick to do the sums, but please let me help you out here matey :) Let me see, that's $699 DIVIDED by the EXCHANGE RATE, which is about $1.63 to ONE UK pound, that would be about 428 quid

Have you got that? Good.

Once more now: 699 / 1.63 = 428

Always willing to help the more mathematically challenged among us. Now go home and be a good little boy. :)

Re:Prices in Britain

[anubi]

Somehow I didn't see this as a failure to understand math. I saw it as 'undefined variable quid'.

An amount in US dollars was specified.

An exchange rate noting the ratio of US dollars to UK pounds was specified.

No mention of what a 'quid' was.

So, from reading the posts, I must assume that a 'quid' is a synonym for 'UK pound'.

In international forums such as this, you may be surprised how many people in one land may be unaware of what is common knowledge in another land.

Re:Prices in Britain

[norite]

No, he/she was just being a real jackass. Shame you can't have a semi sensible chat on /. these days without those immature and childish comments by peeps who think they are trying to be funny creeping in.
Oh well, back to the real world.

Re:Prices in Britain

[anubi]

Yeh, I hear ya. I thought the AC reply was a bit brash too; his communication skills could use a bit more honing. But then, all of us were young and went through break-in of our social skills. I would just chalk it up as social training. At least these forums do provide some proper examples of professional etiquette, as well as examples of not-so-proper etiquette for comparison. They gotta learn somewhere.

Re:Prices in Britain

[norite]

True. There are some genuinely, really side-splittingly hilarious comments on this forum - which just make me smile for the whole day...this why I continue to read slashdot! Perhaps I should browse at +1 in the future! :)

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

[b17bmbr]

first, the training, argument is bullshit. do busineses really sit down and say, "first you take the mouse, move it over the text, push and hold the button, no the left one...". no, you're expected to know how to use a freakin computer. with something like KDE, hell, if some worker drone can't figure it out, they're idiots. one simple email:

dear worker drones:

1. My Documents is now /home/drone
2. you'll be using mozilla instead of IE for the internet. you'll notice the lack of popups.
3. the big K = start button

Thanks.

management.

p.s. since we have transitioned over to linux, and saved shitloads, we'll be upping the christmas, er, holiday bonus this year.

sure, there is support options. but look at it this way: if you save money on software licenses, virus attacks, security holes, etc., then you got a few bucks to hire a linux admin. nuff said. it is that easy. businesses just have to be willing to bite the bullet.

Re:Could it be that you get what you pay for?

[bickerdyke]

not Troll. Just a RTFA.

Check the survey that asks how mans % think that MS is doing enough to enhance WinLin interoperability. I think it's 12% or 13%... so there is an overwhelming majority that wishes MS would say:

"Hmm... how can we make Office emulate OpenOffice? How can we make our desktop look like KDE? How can we share files with SMB?".

Re:...Could auto-destruct your emails....

[flossie]

Auto-destruct e-mail is something that banks and governments could get in a whole lot of trouble for! Many organizations are required to keep *all* e-mails for a number of years. A company I worked for was involved in a merger and one of the stipulations of the go-ahead from the competition commission included this. Besides, what is the point of auto-destruct e-mails unless they also disable all screen-grabbing software and develop fonts that can't be photographed?

Did they figure this out themselvves.... :)

[jmors]

Really. Did they figure that one out themselves or do they have a team of monkeys working on this around the clock?

Perhaps the mystery team of MIT mathematicians from SCO worked this all out, after all they seem to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth, perhaps this math problem is what has had them occupied! :)

Good troll, but you're still an idiot.

[pr0ntab]

How hard was that illogical statement to conjure up? Did you break a sweat? Way to play devil's advocate bucko.

1) TCO
2) Bandwidth/Media costs
3) Expertise

Too easy to ignore as stupidity, except to the few of us who can't keep our mouths shut and blather something from the above list of easy retorts.

And me, who reflexively replies to your posts whenever possible because you don't deserve a positive correlation with anything on this forum.

Re:Good troll, but you're still an idiot.

[lanswitch]

Shall we move the sir haxalot-discussion to his journal? I get the impression that you are trolling somebody who you think is a troll. Hardly useful.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.

Open Source != Free

[jbottero]

There seems to be this notion that Open Source = = Free Software. This is not strictly so. Many companies produce Open Source software for which they charge for.

Re:Open Source != Free

[entartete]

You can also charge for Free Software (with the FSF approved use of capitalization). If i'm making you a customized version of some GPL'ed widget (and charging you my standard exhorbitant contract rate while I do it) it will have to be covered under the terms of the GPL, but if you're just going to use said customized widget on your own machines and not distribute binaries that doesn't really matter much to you. I'll of course be obligated to provide you with the source code to go along with the binaries (and a copy of the GPL for your reading pleasure) but there is no GNU police that are going to send us off to some re-education commune because you paid me to make/modify a piece of Free Software for you. You can make good money on Free Software.

Re:Yes but.

[Master Bait]

Not only that, when the company switches to Linux, the Windows-only IT staff gets laid off. The members of IT staff that know how to work with Linux without expensive 'retraining' get to stay. It's a good way to clean house -- to keep the smart, self-motivated professionally-minded people.

Interesting.....

[mormop]

Integrating Internet Explorer into Windows is monopolistic.

Integrating Media Player into Windows is monopolistic.

and integrating MS Office into Windows errr... isn't?

Re:Yes but.

[Dark Fire]

Integration has been known to lower costs. Microsoft uses integration in a rather clever manner than takes advantage of that assumption. When you buy a single microsoft product, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to have to buy a whole slew of products just to use it. As someone pointed out in another slashdot comment, Exchange 2003 server requires AD which requires Windows 200x. Microsoft has been slowly increasing dependencies between products since windows 95. This is a good business practice in that it provides a way of generating revenue while looking cheaper short term. But initial cost is only 10% of TCO. I challenge that assumption because if you just want to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, you will probably need a complete infrastructure upgrade. Or even better, you upgrade to Office 2007 and need an infrastructure upgrade. That is the path microsoft is following. In terms of employee training (admins, even with excellent training will still have to figure out the quarks/implications of the new software. Most available training for Microsoft products is far from excellent.), business disruption, etc. that certainly raises the cost. It is more difficult to measure since their is no way to compare without using a different setup. I am constantly amazed that Microsoft is pushing businesses toward a disruptive 3 year upgrade cycle despite the increased cost to customers and I am even more amazed how many customers are still sticking with Microsoft. Well, it's their money.

I disagree!

[pr0ntab]

We all know it takes 20 minutes while we sit here waiting for MacOS to copy the file, and no one can figure out why, while it takes 40 seconds for Windows NT.

With linux, the file is on an FTP mirror list and already copied everywhere it's important.

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.?

Re:Yes but.

[hattig]

Most end users on a network should not (and therefore will not if decently adminned) be running sendmail or apache (or equivalents) on their machines.

In fact, only machines that process incoming SMTP mail should be running sendmail (and preferably Exim, Postfix or QMail, if the admins know their jobs), and only web servers should be running Apache. That should be a very small number.

Now Windows Update has to be run on every machine. But installing a new Apache should be happening on 1/100th of the machines.

FreeBSD uses Apache and sendmail too.

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

[Camel Pilot]

if that was only possible. The problem is that key apps are windows apps for small business. For example UPS world ship software, essential shipping integration software from UPS, comes only in a window version, small business software such as Quickbooks is available for windows only, etc. I long for the day when I can buy reasonable priced software with comparable features that runs under Linux.

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

[yoshi_mon]

Hrm, shame you posted as an AC because you bring up some very good points.

I think many people like the functionality of MS products, like Exchange, and think that moving over to something else will be a very big hassle so they just stay with an all MS solution but they just don't know enough.

Key of course is getting a good set of admins and then letting them goto work. Of course having a good set of admins is key for any enterprise level IT but as has been noted many times before here on /. MCSE's are easier to find. Some of them actually even know what they are doing but...still.

Re:Yes but.

[MidnightBrewer]

because cp filename newfilename takes 20 minutes?

Depends on how long the path is, whether or not you know the path off-hand, and whether or not you make a mistake typing it in.

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

[El]

No, there are training, maintenance and support costs assoctiated with software even if the software itself is free. However, at this point it seems highly unlikely that any of those costs are lower for M$ products than for open source. In fact, given the number of patches coming out lately for M$ software, I would have to guess that the maintenance costs are much higher for M$ software. I find any claims about TCO being lower for XP than open source or even previous M$ products to be "extremely dubious" (which is a polite way of saying "utter and complete bullshit!")

And the marketing boys say anything.

[Stumbles]

Of course Microsoft would say " increased integration will cut down ongoing costs, maintenance and what not".

Ever since the dawn of Windows 95 they have been saying pretty much the same marketing non-sense. Yet with every new issue of a Microsoft OS you almost have to or HAVE TO upgrade the hardware.

In any business environment hardware costs can run into serious coinage. So now that Win2003 is the next best thing to sliced bread I suppose all the hype and non-sense about how great their past OS's were was nothing but a bunch of marketing bull.

Re:And the marketing boys say anything.

[Mr.roboto]

It's not really the integration that I object to, some things are nice to have. But on the other side, Word being integrated? Why do you need Word on a server, for a server you need one text editor; NOTEPAD.

Re:And the marketing boys say anything.

[Stumbles]

Your right integration is good for some things like maybe databases and things of that scale. For everyday work processing, spreadsheeting that is done in a business environment "integration" isn't really needed.

At my last place of employment they had 500 users and of course Office. Out of all those I never saw a user have any more need than the 20 or 30 so basic uses of a word processor, spreadsheet and access.

No what it really amounts to for Microsoft is they feel the need to keep the waters churned (muddy) so they can create some new buzz words to hook everyone on why they need this new gizmo.

Better to just have a Mac in that instance

[adzoox]

It's better to just have a Mac in the case of cost you mention (virus/exploit)

Also, I think POS (with mac POS) and database with a secure version of excel or better yet FileMaker is a better option than any Microsoft offering as well.

Honestly and unbiasly I say this as well ... Macs have FAR less down time in my personal IT experience as well.

Re:LOL

[El]

Uh, where did they get your address to send you threatening letters? Maybe you are as stupid as they think you are! Personally, all my M$ software is registered to billg@microsoft.com... I'm not sure what he does with the threatening letters...

This is not flamebait, mods, what are you thinking

[waferhead]

See subject.

Re:Costs

[El]

This as not as obvious as it seems at first glance; M$ has actually been claiming that it's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is lower than that if Free/Open Source software, because it's easier to maintain. This report points out that the TCO claims are bullshit (to those few people that didn't realize that in the first place.)

Only Part of the Picture

[Uhlek]

While important, this article only addresses the cost of licenses, which most IT pros will tell you is on a fraction of the TCO for a system.

The remainder -- staffing costs, infrastructure requirements, etc. -- are what make up a bulk of the TCO.

Then, of course, you have to take that TCO and factor it into an ROI study to see if it's actually "worth it" in dollar figures to implement the system.

This is where Microsoft often beats Linux flat. In addition to the fact that Microsoft-trained staffers are significantly cheaper that Linux-trained staffers, there's the cost and hassle of the migration to worry about. Seeing as most companies only look to next quarter, it's seen as an increase in cost, not a decrease.

These rising costs, though, will encourage more and more companies to take the leap. As the required refresh cycle for software and hardware continues to get longer and longer, companies will start to look 5, 10, even 15 years down the road in respect to their planning, and Linux will begin to have an edge.

Re:Only Part of the Picture

[Radon Knight]

> Microsoft-trained staffers are significantly cheaper that
> Linux-trained staffers,

Well, duh, you only have to buy bananas!

Avoiding Lockin

[nurb432]

Problem is for many large companies that have been on the MOLP train for years, it would be really hard for them to seek alternatives.

Its part of the plan, force people into staying, and funding, microsoft.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

absolutely.

from someone who has been in several med/large corporate environments...i.e. 500, 1000, 3000, 15,000 strong and sbc as well (200,000)

i can say with certainty that training is a complete farse.

in the best of environments, it nets you almost nothing. we're not talking about On The Job Training...whereby one learns their job by doing their job.

i'm talking about classes, conferences, on staff trainers...in house and out sourced Microsoft Office training, Windows 101 ....etc etc etc.

it's a load of crap.

if you've got a boat load of stupid people on your staff..you are so screwed...cause training isn't going to help.

sharp ppl will figure things out, good departments pull together to make sure new additions get EXACTLY the knowledge they need to do their job...no more no less.

i'm sure a few exceptions exist...and i'm sure they will be replying shortly.

Re:Yes but.

[Artifakt]

See if I ever unstop your plugged garbage disposal/re-roof your condo/defend you in court again.

Microsoft's response to article

[overbyj]

It's not a monopolistic powerplay to squeeze companies out of every dime possible by integrating clients and servers, it is a feature!

May?

[Mike Hawk]

I don't have the will to read the thing, but whats the point of a study to find out something may be something? Then in the little blurb used for the headline it is acknowledged that the switch from "collection of applications" to "platform" could possibly make up the cost. I'm not reading anything that can at best come to the conclusion something possibly could happen. Watch this:

Linux may cost more to use than Windows.
Windows may cost more to use than Mac.
Using MS Office may make your PC explode.
Using Photoshop may make you a homosexual.

I don't have any facts to back this stuff up, conditions may change, and IANAL, but in the great universe any of these things may happen. God Bless May.

Re:May?

[Knights who say 'INT]

Mod parent up as insightful, for chrissake. Linux fanboy cheering ain't news. It's not like CIO's read Slashdot anyway.

Relative to who you are.

[dripwipeflush]

Yep I understand and also think we need a more friendly website to produce information for alternatives to Microsoft software. For those of you that have seen the Blue Screen of Death, goto FuckMicrosoft.com. For those of you that enjoy a little spice with your operating system, try GNU/Lesbian or RTFM OS. And for those of you that always RTFM, try Emacs OS; just remember that when using Emacs OS, you need a good wordprocessor and the best one you can get is here.

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

[ichimunki]

Interesting notion. Except that it's not really true. I spend as much time tinkering with Microsoft garbage at work to get it to work as desired as I do with GNU/Linux to get it running smoothly. In fact, using GNU/Linux I can usually achieve the desired result more quickly. But maybe that's because I'm not as willing to put in an effort on the MS side, I dunno.

But business aren't in it to save money.

[DocUi]

Business are looking to help out the bottom line. Look at it like this.

You make $100 in a year. This puts you into a tax bracket that costs you $25 in taxes. Net for the year, $75.

But if you spend $5 in software, and claim it as an expense, you drop a bracket and you pay only $15 in taxes. Net for the year $80.

Software is a capital expenditure and depreciates at 100% per year. So you can claim it all back. Hardware I belive depreciates at either 33% or 50%/ year. Maybe even more.

Now, governments are not in the business of making money, they are in the business of spending it. Our money! Gr! So, if they can spend less by going open source then by all means, I work in the public sector, and while we run a MS Desktop and combo MS/Novell(aie!) shop. (Along with Unix, Solaris, and a whole crapload of other stuff), if they went to an open source to save crap loads of taxpayer money? Sign me up for the Linux courses and away we go.

Just some thoughts.

Re:But business aren't in it to save money.

[shis-ka-bob]

This is very strange math, an accountant would not describe it like this. You amost make it sound that software is free. Like all expenses, it reduces your taxable income. Since the marginal tax rate never exceeds 40%, most of the burden remains with the corporation. I find it chilling that you seem to think that in a market economy, the government would effectively pay corporate expenses by allowing corporations to lower their tax burden dollar for dollar for their business expenses.

Secondly, governments are not in the business of spending money. They are 'in the business' of providing common services that can be more effectively done collectively. Courts, police, fire departments, military, highways, schools are example of activities that are done by governments. As you may guess, these services take ... money. Real people do these services and they deserve to be paid with real money. Grrr .. I wish everyone else would just work for free, its so much better for me.

There is good evidence that governments can do certain tasks more efficiently than private industry. The US healthcare system consumes about 13.6% of GDP. The French healthcare system consumes about 10.6%. Which system covers 100% of the population? (France). In which system do doctors still makes housecalls? (France). Which system has a lower infant mortaility rate? (France) Which system requires the doctor's office to spend several minutes verifying that you have insurance and figuring out how much you have to pay for todays visit (US). By the way, the French system doesn't mall all doctors state employees, many doctors are in private practice - they only have to deal with one set of bureactrats to get paid.

Re:But business aren't in it to save money.

[Anonnymous Coward]

In the U.S. at least, tax brackets are incremental. Someone in the 40% bracket doesn't pay 40% on all his income; only that over the threshold of the 40% bracket. Thus, reducing one's income into the next lower tax bracket doesn't result in a whole bunch of income suddenly being taxed at a lower rate--it already was being taxed at the lower rate.

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

[Evilive]

Excellent "case study" type material..perfect to knock the wind out of the sails of the "it can't be done" camp. You should consider doing a write up of your experience switching over. Seems it would be valuable material to give to the PHBs for reading.

Re:Yes but.

[kfg]

I would posit that if it takes you more than five minutes to copy a Linux file after the first trial run you can't do any of those things better than I can do them myself.

I also reserve the right to be offended at being accused of owning a garbage disposal and/or a condo.

KFG

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

[Darby]

Infinity does not have a place on the number line (anyone who wants to say it's at the end is just going to prove their ignorance).

But you can represent the infinite numberline as the unit circle. One point is infinity (positive and negative). With some fairly sophisticated mathematics, it works out very nicely.

It's known as a compactification of the reals.
Check it out.

It's a free news service. Quit yer bitchin'!

[DeathPenguin]

If you create an account (free) and log in, you can disable Microsoft and Caldera/SCO related stories in your preferences and they will not appear to you on the front page.

Re:Yes but.

[Joey7F]

Is that option always available though? I tried it a few times on some distro (although it could have been AIX) and I remember hitting tab with no luck (great feature though!)

--Joey

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

[ambar1073]

do busineses really sit down and say, "first you take the mouse, move it over the text, push and hold the button, no the left one..."

Hell yes, they do! And it's not because their employees are "stupid" or whatever other moronic arguments you make.

If you work in IT, then it's obvious that you know something about how to use a computer. Sure, some companies expect some people in some jobs to have computer literacy skills, and usually those skills are on MS Office, or Wordperfect or Lotus 1-2-3. Training and retraining really is expensive. People in, say, accounting or manufacturing know how to do THEIR jobs, not YOURS. They don't spend their days tinkering with computers, they spend it doing a real job for which they get paid real money.

If you were to take my marketing job, I GUARANTEE you would get your ass handed to you, day in and day out, forever. You don't know how to use a machine tool? You don't know how to close a company's quarterly books? You don't know how the mailroom works? Boy, you must be a complete moron.

Yes, you're expected to know how to "use a freaking computer". That computer is called an x86 personal computer running Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. My marketing job is not valuable unless I know how to use that OS and those applications, and I know how to use them well.

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

[HangingChad]

This is not a unique experience. The only real FUM-BLE's I've seen were when Windows admins attempted to implement Linux. Most of those were a disaster. Otherwise, there are many experiences similar to the one you describe.

There just isn't any deep pocket funding the success story ink.

You left out how easy it is for the administrator to push out updates with Debian. :)

Amazing to me MS never seems to learn anything. It's like they're trying to soak up as much money as they can before the end. Sad. It didn't used to be that way in Redmond.

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

[jedidiah]

Your drivel about our lack of ability to do marketing is completely irrelevant. The fact remains that to do YOUR job of marketing there are certain computer skills required. These skills are best acquired in an abstract manner rather than being some limited rote. This way you can actually exploit the tools available to you to more effectively do YOUR job.

The sorry fact of the matter is that computing skills are no longer purely the domain of the IT department. If you can't compute well, all of the marketing wizadry know-how in the world will probably mean jack sh*t.

Management types with dedicated secretaries that can shield them from office technology can get away with being total tech rubes.

Drones like you in the trenches really can't.

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

[jedidiah]

larry + curly + moe larry + curly

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

[hazem]

TCO is dead. Long live ROI!

Isn't the TCO part of the ROI?

I mean.. for an accurate appraisal of the return on the investment, you have to determine what that investment and its related costs are.

Please provide some links showing how these are calculated differently. Thanks!

Choosing costs nothing

[EmbeddedJanitor]

living with the choice costs!

10%-40% more ...

[ScrewMaster]

That's all?

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

[Jason1729]

There where is 1 on this numberline?

Jason
ProfQuotes

Increased Integration is a Fallacy

[tjstork]

Most corporate IT environments need to embrace real document management systems, not, try and build uber applications instead.

I work at a firm whose essential strategy is try to and replace the work product of financial types in excel with collections of applications dedicated to different parts of the process. As a result of this, the business has become stagnated and locked into a process that exists largely because of the weight of money that went to create it, not because it has ever really been questioned.

Sometimes flexibility is worth more than one would think.

Manipulating people through footnotes...

[sheldon]

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.

Not just news.

[Inoshiro]

News for nerds, or at least information for nerds.

If there are new TCO stories everyday, then they are more than free to post it here. It's a closed story posting system, with the only available control being the submission system for general users.

If you don't want to read them, then just skip them. It's the only choice you have.

Re:Could it be that you get what you pay for?

[aweraw]

Wow, way to contribute to society and the economy.

excuse me? are you trying to say Linus has contributed to neither the economy or society? pardon me while a go red in the face with laughter...

Get this, Linus has given years of virtually free labour to Linux, which is doing quite well as a server OS in many businesses that make money via its functionality...

could you please enlighten me as to how this equates to zero contribution to society?

Would you also care to inform me, how having an OS that is monitarily free (keeps money in peoples pockets), and creates jobs for sys-admins and training organizations (not to mention hundreds of other businesses using Linux in their business plan) is not contributing to the economy?

Didn't think so troll...

Re:Well duh

[shadow099]

Hmm, TCO is cheaper huh.. well lets see about this... 1,000 people downloading patches for thier WinBlows boxes.... X 1 hour per month (remember Microsoft only distributes monthly patches) X adverage 15$ an hour per person = 15,000$ per month, 150,000$ per year.. and just the patching... not including loss of productivity, etc... etc... etc...

How?

[Fringex]

I remember a Slashdot article that was post sometime this year in regards to running a company on Linux versus Windows and which decision was cheaper. In accordance with the article run here on Slashdot it was cheaper to run Windows.

What sucks is I can't back it up because I can't seem to find the article but I know I read it, because I couldn't believe it to be true.

Re:How?

[Fringex]

I can't seem to find the stupid article. I know it is in here somewhere. Time to start hacking the DB.

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

[Joe U]

Most people who spend all day in word or excel would completely freak out if it suddenly changed.

We are talking about the average workers. Basic computer training is not for IT staff, it's for typists, CS reps, managers, etc...

To these people it doesn't matter that it's Windows running Office, what matters is that it's the same interface they have been using for years. It's what they were taught to do when they started working.

To discount someone's intelligence for not learning computer skills beyond the beginner level is just plain stupid. Not everyone wants to be a computer geek. It's like saying "Wow, you can't run a successful farm, you must be an idiot"

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

[Doomdark]

first, the training, argument is bullshit. do busineses really sit down and say, "first you take the mouse, move it over the text, push and hold the button, no the left one...". no, you're expected to know how to use a freakin computer. with something like KDE, hell, if some worker drone can't figure it out, they're idiots.

You obviously have never worked for a big company, or even a medium-sized one that actually has non-geeks as employees... you'd be surprised. You are also acting arrogant, trivializing changes that are non-trivial for people whose main function at work is NOT to learn how to use new tools to do the same old work.

Now, for small startups the desktop part just MIGHT be ok; or at least training might be just people teaching each other where to find things that are in different places. But desktop is really the least of worries. Fun starts when users have to switch their office suite, and other essential tools for their jobs. Even apps seemingly simple to use, like web browsers or mail clients, are likely to be very different. Even if individual differences are minor, net effect is big. Thus, people have to learn to use the new tools; training for that may be formal or informal, or even self-training via trial-and-error. But don't even think there's no learning curve, temporary lost productivity, and associated costs. Even if there need not be silly "how to click my mouse" training.

Of course, similar (level of) training is needed no matter which direction change is going, to or from open source, or between closed source environments.

Re: Monopoly

[benjamindees]

MS has a monopoly on Windows-compatible operating systems. That's all that was implied. We all know that Microsoft doesn't make computers.

Besides, a monopoly is an economic device, not merely a dictionary definition. It is the opposite of a 'free-market'. In a free market with zero barrier to competition, the market price of a product will approach it's production cost. With a monopoly (or various forms of collusive pricing among market leaders), the market price of a product will remain above production cost, as is the case with most of Microsoft's products.

This is the realistic definition of a monopoly, since, by your strict definition, all products have 'substitutes' that are sufficiently similar to prevent a monopolist from charging "whatever the hell they like". In the case of MS software, pencil and paper comes to mind.

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

[groman]

But how many MCSE-man-hours do you need to get Exchange working in the first place? Probably the same in $$ amounts to hack together an open groupware environment. Exchange is one of the poorest written popular microsoft products(close third after SourceSafe and Windows ME), and it's a constant headache and a capricious environment.

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

[b17bmbr]

actually there is a difference. for instance, with the forced upgrades, there are changes. try going from office97 to office XP. which many have had to do. now, computer skills are just that, skills. the point is is that it is very possible to introduce say, linux/OO.org to an employee, and expect them to be able to use it. if they are familiar enough with computers, then they can figure out in a relatively short time the differences. for example, do you know how to embed a spreadsheet into a word doc? if yes, then you'll be able to figure out how to do it, because you'll know what it is you're trying to do. whereas if you don't know it on any program, then it isn't an option, whatever suite your using. if you have skills, then you should be able to adapt very quickly. and if a company can save some real bucks, then it makes sense. now, there are some things for sure where say excel is necessary, fine. but imagine going into a job interview, and saying i know program X, and if you're asked, "can you do program Y?", you reply, "no, i do program X", and when asked if you have the skills to learn a new program ,you reply no. yeah, you'll get the job.

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

[Doomdark]

Eh, sounds convincing to me? Although I personally prefer Laurel and Hardy.

Re:Maybe you missed the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am taught what a door looks like, and how it works, I can be reasonably sure it will work that way for all doors (or most, anyway). I don't have to be re-trained for every door I encounter, because they are similar enough that I can easily figure out how to resolve any variation between them. I think it can be reasonably argued that the Linux desktop is similar *enough* to Windows, that the "retraining" we keep hearing about might not really be that be big an issue.

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

[BrokenHalo]

If you were to take my marketing job...

I'd rather die.

...you would get your ass handed to you, day in and day out, forever.

The significance of that remark escapes me. Do marketroids keep their asses somewhere other than in their pants, and need to tender them to someone else for safekeeping?

There are plenty of free alternatives to MSOffice out there, and the interfaces are so similar to that of MSOffice that there is really no reason why anybody with a reasonable handle on one should not be perfectly productive on the other.

Re:Well duh

[lanswitch]

Okay, you must be mcse, right? Here are the answers to your problems

Invest a little and buy Ximian Red Carpet. It will do anything you asked for in your example, concerning the updates.
For the lusers, you create a simple manual (Can Be Done) that explains the main differnces. 90% of the lusers will understand it, and continue working. The 10% that doesn't get it, is the same 10% that never will understand computers.
You are using mission-critical applications without any kind of support and no alternatives? You like living dangerously...
The dev department should have been aware of the change in advance. In companies, this is required. Then they can plan their work.
Nobody needs a root password, if you know what you are doing. Chroot-jail, perhaps? Install it for them? Since they only want a "few apps" it won't be much work. Especially when you use Red Carpet.
When you buy equipment like printers, OS-support is an issue. If you invest in the right models from the right manufacturers, you will find that there is support. And with all the money you are saving on software, you now can upgrade the printers to good (and compatible) printers.

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

[msh104]

so if it costs "probably the same" to hack together an open groupware product and exchange is "one of the poorest written populair microsoft products" and "is a constant headache" then i'd say i would go for the open groupware solution, because it works fine with me and does not give me headaces and is fun to develop.

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

[0x0d0a]

Your profession is to interfere in market transactions to persuade participants to make irrational decisions in your favor. That's defective and antisocial behavior.

Keep in mind that many folks, like you, say that exploiting flaws in human psychology or knowledge is a Bad Thing. A good number of those go on to support cracking ("but the system *allowed* it!), which seems to me hypocritical.

Keep in mind that a major reason the West is wealthy is not because of natural resources (which are scattered all over the world). It's not because of knowledge (there are smart people all over the world with decent education). It's not even all because of the willingness to use military power in nasty ways. No, the West got mass media early on, learned how to market very, very well, and proceeded to drive up demand for western goods.

As a result, you make many, many times what a worker in the Phillipines makes.

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

[0x0d0a]

While that's a reasonable complaint if you're arguing for large-business customers, he wasn't. It's significant for small-business folks. Furthermore, I see little reason why his argument wouldn't scale. If anything, it's more useful if more computers are present, since (a) he pointed out that the majority of the conversion costs were essentially constant (him figuring out conversion processes) and (b) maintenance, a major cost that normally scales linearly with the number of machines, has been eliminated, and (c) traditionally, per-user costs increase superlinearly -- enterprise customers are herded towards more expensve solutions. All three of these points are in favor of large-scale deployment working more successfully than small-scale deployment.

This *does* sound like an unusually good conversion, IMHO, though. There were no oddball custom apps that were written exclusively for Windows aside from a few macros and VB. There were no oddball elderly hardware devices that needed to be supported. This wouldn't be the case for a bank or a physics research lab, respectively.

In general, I've had pretty good luck with set-it-up-and-forget-it Linux servers. They really are more suited to this than Windows servers. Better designed for remote administration, cheaper, less stuff masking what's actually happening and making troubleshooting difficult.

Re: 15 years behind

[hany]

I've noticed that admins with 30 years of unix experience seem to be about 15 years behind the rest of the world.

Maybe that's why they are ussualy happier?
(at leat with "their" computers)

:)

"New" does not always means "better". Say "new disease", "new environment pollutant", "new way to produce even more pollution", "new software with new bugs to make new worms made-easy", ...

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

[JamieF]

>Key of course is getting a good set of admins and then letting them goto work.

CIO to-do list:
Step 1: replace old expensive Unix servers with new Wintel hardware, because a white box clone costs less than a Sun server. Insist on using Windows because Linux is all complicated 'n stuff, and Windows has a GUI, and you can sue Microsoft if something goes wrong. (Note to self: remember to make a list of companies which have taken Microsoft to court in the past & won.)
Step 2: replace grumbling, expensive Unix admins with snappily dressed MCSEs. Remember, that Gartner article we got for free said that people cost way more than licenses or hardware, so let's go as cheap on people as possible!
Step 3: watch costs spiral out of control as more MCSEs and more hardware are required. WTF happened? Blame subordinates, blame the vendor.
Step 4: ask MCSEs for a recommendation.

Shocking! The MCSEs recommend further investment in the products they already know! Why are we buying Exchange, NetMeeting, and SharePoint instead of competing products? Was there a TCO study, a trial of multiple products, maybe some application-specific consultant brought in? Nope. they just recommended the MS solution, and the CIO signed the P.O. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!"

I was going to put it to the test...

[NickRuisi]

I work in an advertising agency. A good portion of my users are very non-techincal. After the latest Win32 exploits were announced, I became so frustrated with having to install patches that I asked if I can set up a RH 9.0 box, with Wine (for Lotus Notes client), Star Office, Mozilla and get the system all set up for one of these non-tech savvy users. Still waiting for a response on this one...

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

[Sri Lumpa]

I don't understand, I don't have any K on my computer, but I think a cracker got into my computer, he even left a footprint.

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

[Joe U]

"...if you have the skills to learn a new program ,you reply no. ..."

The correct reply is "Yes, with training". Hence a training budget.

A computer is a tool, the same way the phone, a wrench, a photocopier and a combine harvester are all tools. All require some degree of training.

Just because learning "computers" (in general) comes easy to you and I, does not mean it does to everyone.

Just dropping new software in, even if it's Office 97 to Office XP, requires some amount of learning/training.

Cost: MS vs Linux

[9mind]

I think it's pretty simple...

Microsoft currently has a monopoly for their security flawed software... due to the fact that they WERE better in the past, than any of their competitors. There are more MS trained individuals due to this fact

Upgrading, training, and hiring linux admins IS going to cost more...

HOWEVER... most people are missing the simple fact... you can run a version of linux for X amount of years without upgrading... where as Windows upgrades almost every 2-3 years and usually has hardware costs attached to it. Also when you do upgrade the OS, more often than not, you have to upgrade all the Productivity and Development packages with it. Which will definitely be higher than 40%. Also, you're IT people have to get trained on the latest versions of the software... even more money. Then after a certain period of time MS will not support the older OSes and software

• How often does a Linux users knowledge of the OS become outdated?
• How often is support of and older version of Linux dropped.
• How often do we have to relearn the OS?
• How often is new hardware needed to upgrade the OS?

Intial cost may be prohibitive from switching to Linux... however, you can easily save money on upgrading hardware, software, and training with Linux over time. Also when you upgrade the OS... you get all the new packages with it. Once Linux becomes more prevalent in the market so will the amount of administrators, which will drive down demand, which will also drive down expensive salaries.

Anyone that argues that Linux is more expensive than MS is blind. Anyone can EASILY see the savings if they look.

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

[tds67]

As a result, you make many, many times what a worker in the Phillipines makes.

And also as a result, goods and services cost many, many times what they cost a worker in the Phillipines.

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

[AnyNoMouse]

I'm just going to point out an interesting anecdote. It's just my experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

Where I work, we use Lotus Notes. If you've ever used it, you know it's not like the Outlook Express that most people use at home. We don't spend more than a minute or so with new employees letting them know the major points to look out for. We give them a shiny handout that explains the more detailed instructions. If they have problems, they call us.

It's really not that tough. A good 90% of the people I work with are Notes Pros by the end of the week. And no, the number of Engineers is dwarfed by the number of sales drones so it's not a matter of having "smarter" users. Admittedly, we get a few id-10-t's that couldn't remember their own name if it wasn't printed on their shirt, but it's really a pretty small number.

Oh, we also give the mechanics Open Office (on Windows) instead of MS Office. They don't run any of our standard VB apps, so they aren't tied to the platform and the Upper Management doesn't want to spend any money on them (we use >3 year machines for them). I don't think they even notice the difference... :-P

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

[mpe]

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

N.B. "Functionality" in this context equates to what they actually use rather than whatever "functionality plug bells & whistles" the thing might come with.
Also you need to consider the cost of getting exhange to work and maintaining it.

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.

If you actually really do measure everything then Microsoft is going to have a hard time competing with OSS since catagories of TCO such as "Maintaining a perfect inventory of software licences in case the BSA come knocking" only apply to proprietary software. With MS Windows there is anti-virus software, patching all sorts of things Microsoft has chosen to "integrate" into the OS for no very good reason, forced "upgrades" to push the TCO up still further.

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

[0x0d0a]

Not proportionally as high, however. The US standard of living is still much higher. There tends to be an influx of wealth into western nations.

Ever heard of the Smith Chart?

[JCMay]

I use something similar to what the grandparent post speaks of: the Smith Chart

Inside the circle of the Smith Chart exists every possible transmission line termination, from the open circuit (Z= infinity), to the short circuit (Z=0) and everything in between. "1," or a perfect match, is located at the center of the chart.

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

[Zontar The Mindless]

So you're a marketer. Your profession is to interfere in market transactions to persuade participants to make irrational decisions in your favor. That's defective and antisocial behavior.

That's bloody brilliant. Too bad you posted as AC -- I'd have added you to my Friends list.

Re: 15 years behind

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Please don't tell me that you are going to attempt to argue that old technology is consistently better than new technology.

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

[marko123]

Ah, sorry. Bullshit to you. If a company is faced with a new technology, especially a new platform, training is vital. New software requires training. Especially if the staff are good at their jobs, but not computer power users. They need to be told how to do their jobs in the new tech environment. They can't work it out themselves, but once they are shown, they continue to do the job that they are experts in, but using a new set of tools.

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

[Wolfrider]

--The key is to print the names on their shirts backwards, so that when they take their (frequent) bathroom breaks, they see their name in the mirror and get a fresh reminder.

Bingo bango bongo. FORE!!!

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

[Wolfrider]

--Hmm. I'm not sure whether to meta-meta mod you Funny or Informative.
Let's go with +1 Insightful.

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

[ambar1073]

Ironically, marketing is the very reason you're convinced that Microsoft Windows and Office are actually quality products, and you appear happy to use them despite your belief that you have no other choice. You should be pissed off that there aren't a dozen interoperable choices that suit your needs.

Actually, I have a degree in computer science. From an Ivy League university. Graduated top of my class. I can probably code you into the ground and design faster and more efficient algorithms, to boot. Just because I'm a marketer doesn't mean I'm a moron, jackoff. And don't forget who has to sell and market the buggy shit you code together between bouts of Jolt and Quake and wacking off to pr0n in your office. If it wasn't for we "marketers", you'd be unemployed.

But that's not the point. I have worked in high tech marketing for the past 6 years. I don't want some fucking choice. I don't want to tinker with some half-assed, cobbled-together piece of shit thrown together by volunteers, that MAYBE works with my coworkers, the half-dozen vendors and marketing agencies I work with, etc.

I have a job to do. When I switch jobs, which I do every couple of years, I want to show up for work and be sitting in front of the EXACT SAME APPLICATIONS in each place. I don't have time to learn a new word processor, or spreadsheet, or presentation package. No, they're not "too hard" to learn but even for a CS major like me who spent years working in IT, I don't give a fuck. They're just tools for me to do my job. I learned them once, don't want to learn them again, even if it means that the keyboard commands are different.

Fuck choice. Choice is for down-and-out unemployed weenies who have time to tinker. I have a job to do.

Re: consistently better

[hany]

I wote: "... "New" does not always means "better". ...".

You wrote: "... you are going to attempt to argue that old technology is consistently better than new technology ...".

So the answer to your question: No, I'm not going to argue (or attemtpt to argue) that old technology is consistently better than new technology. I repeat: "New" does not always means "better". :)

p.s.: AC hinted on what I have in mind from another perspective. But there are also a lot of other examples but that's for another discussion.

Re:...Could auto-destruct your emails....

[molnarcs]

about email leakage: ...cryptography...cryptography...cryptography...