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Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims
apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."
I can agree wuth that. i tried selling linux with open office idea to the adminstrative types, and they were like, no we need Ms office.
As for open source on the desktop systems, Peters said although most of the applications are Webbased, a nonnative version of Lotus Notes for Linux and the lack of Microsoft Office are impediments to Linux on the desktop
I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?
I live in Chile and i must say Chilean IT managers are very intrested in this kind of resources. At least 6 big Chilean firms are considering moving existing management, database and mail(the pain of spam beaking throug) to Linux as a safer, cheaper and more reliable alternative. But in general people are affraid since there always will be a Microsofr counterreport saying otherwise. As long as Linux doesnt gain reputation within the corporate world, it'll still be a small idealistic comunity. So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
I have not come across anything that MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do. AppleWorks is a bit crippled. The MacOS X version seems to be exactly like the one that I used to run on my PowerBook 1400c way back when. .DOC files? Feature wise MS Office has always kind of pissed me off, but document formating was a total sabot in the gears when trying to get my stuff to print off of windows machines at school
Is the cause just coverting some of the document formating used in existing
f.p. too
Fortunately, on the other hand more and more government institutions give Linux a fair chance as well in competing with Microsoft and especially on the cost side, Linux (and other open source) wins! (Community of Munich, Amsterdam is considering it and I bet there are more examples)
About time, I could really welcome a tax cut. I hate to lose my tax money on Microsoft.
Always good to hear about some large company/organisations plan to move over to linux - its just a shame its missing more of the technical details..
i'm forever curious to know how everything integrates - think Active Directory on windows, is there such a thing for linux? if not, how do users login to various machines? how is the fileserver secured?
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
The article is mostly a narrative of a large IT shop that is bringing open source into doing different parts of its business, with databases and desktops still living in the proprietary world.
The guy in charge is no zealot, just evaluating his options and doing what makes sense.
The bottom line is:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It was reported that the latest virus incurred a loss of about 30b dollar globally. At this backdrop, I am just wondering do these consultacny firms like Gartner and all include the cost of fighting virus and the loss incurred by them while calculating the TCO ?
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe you quite handily defeat yourself there.
"Product W [...] is sold [...] by a single vendor who relies on [...] features to sell the product." (emphasis added)
Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying, but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable. In environments were stability is most important (always-on systems, such as internet, power, and telecom), Linux will do well. In other environments, it won't.
"Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first."
You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP. For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others. OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example. For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite. Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch? People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals, in my estimation.
G
Another note to evangelists. If people only use word and have no need for spreadsheets databases and such. Convert them to abiword on windows first. My usual conversion strategy is thunderbird firefUx, abiword and gaim. Once they've got that down if they like it I say, you know... all the software on linux is like that. In fact, the whole os is like that.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
'Objective Studies' aside, there is little comparison in performance, ease of maintenance, etc. The answer I've begun giving the Windows Admins here at work (who are fighting for server installs - a losing battle in this age of dropping budgets and 'increased efficiencies') is this: Go and administer an enterprise level *nix network for five years, then come back to me and we'll compare notes. (Yes, I did my time as an MS Admin, MCSE+I and all that crap, back when NT was going to save the world)
IMHO, the only reason M$ still has any of the server space at all is 'time to market' considerations, and the overall lower level of expertise. Back when I was a Windows admin, I used to say: "The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft designed it so that any idiot could set it up - and most of them do."
Any given network is only as stable/secure as its administrator, it's true, but remember that the ideal case stability of the platform represents a hard limit, no matter how competent the admin. Anybody wanna bet their job on 5 9s from NT?
Thinking outside my Head
Features definitely do not equal value despite the propaganda that tries to convince people otherwise.
The essence of good design is simplicity and value comes from the elimination of unnecessary features, not their addition.
You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.
As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.
Finally, people will switch to OOorg for several reasons. Firstly when the weight of yearly licenses starts to hurt. Secondly, to avoid yet one more cycle of upgrades that break large numbers of existing configurations for little obvious gain. Thirdly, when they are running old versions and do not want to pay once more for new ones. Lastly, and I believe significantly, many people use MS Office with no license at all. OOorg provides them a way to become "legitimate".
Now, the discussion is not about "why switch", it's about cost.
In a global market, any business that pays more than it needs to for a service (including software) is at a competitive disadvantage, and will eventually be beaten by leaner competitors.
Microsoft's offerings costs more, and for the majority of its users, this extra cost simply does not translate into extra value. You cannot debate this observation away. If you work for Microsoft, you would do better to consider how such an unbalanced business model can actually survive. Eventually your customers will be unable to pay for your products, however much they like them. What will you do then?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Just sent out 2000 brochures using FileMaker and MacLabel on OS X.2. Had bar codes and everything. The fun part was getting the address database from a flat file into the FileMaker relational database. Was able to use Perl to do this from the command line in OS X. I doubt that it would be as easy to do this in Windows. Can you even get to a command line in the latest version of Windows? Is Perl included? Can you easily write your own scripts?
Yes, you are just one lame user who is semi-competent in keeping up to date, knows what a firewall is, understands the term pop-up blocker, etc.
I run a computer lab of 20 Linux machines, and several Linux servers. I work in a building where everyone else uses Windows. Guess who goes home at a reasonable hour everyday? Guess which machines are a constant pain? I've been using Linux for a couple of years now, and I'll probably never use MS junk again. If you are happy with Windows, fine. Note that most are not...hence the ever-increasing tide of change to Linux, BSD, etc. MS reminds me of the fall of the Roman Empire...:-) Guess you're a Roman...fiddling, perhaps? =)
The first job that I worked for, in India, back in 1997-98, was a big M$ shop. We worked on C/C++/Win32SDK/VC++/MFC/COM. I used to be treated as the villain around the office, because I was the only Linux evangelist. I had to sneak in one 486 and run a seperate domain for the few linux lovers there.
Last week I had a chance to run into my previous project manager, and he was telling me that they went completely Linux. The organisation grew from a group of 40 programmers to 250 dudes. The only reason for this is, with the recent M$ licensing policy it was impossible to buy so many licenses. Now the whole organization is running RH 9.x and they use it to monitor home security systems and medical automation.
So please dont give us bull about TCO M$!!!
As an OS X user, my solution to this has always been to first determine whether the end user will need read only access to the document or rather will want to be able to edit. For example, a resume sent to a prospective employer (not a contracting agency) won't need to be edited.
If it can be read only, I just use the built in Print to PDF functionality and send the person a PDF. That's a near universally readable format and certainly in most business situations.
If it must be editable, then I will generally shoot for RTF, simply because it is, yet again, nearly universally readable.
If they refuse to accept those formats and I have to do business with them, then I will author the document in the editor of my choice and export to the appropriate format. Naturally this can cause problems when the export functionality isn't precise enough, but I can't honestly recall when the last time was that I had to do this anyway.
No and yes. It's might be the best package when it comes to cooperation between the programs, when it comes to intuitivity, though it can be argued thats because everyone allready knows how MsOffice works. In fact Im pretty sure that any office-package not behaving exactly like MsOffice would be claimed to be less intuitive. Because everyone knows how MsOffice works.
But let's call these things technicalities. My beef is with another part of the package. A part which usually is unseen for most users, but nevertheless presents a problem.
Let's say we take a look at MsWord, for example. My first encounter must have been with version 2. The documents were labeled with the extension .doc. Take a look at the newest version, still suffixed with .doc.
Does anyone know what the actual diffferences in the file format is? Have you ever tried exchanging documents with people working with older version of MsOffice? If not, let me tell you right away that hell will arise.
The newest version of Office will recognise the documents, and open them without any indication that it is treating a depricated format.
In some cases (no deep research conducted here, on my part) if you edit the document, and save it, and return it to the sender, it will remain in the old format. However, sometimes (if you use some new features, or god knows why) it will save the document in the new Office format. All without any warning.
Now guess what will hapeen if you cooperate on some work between Office versions. The incompatabilities between the different versions of the fileformats risks rendering your work totally useless.
And Microsoft really haven't seemed that eager to document the formats at all or their differences.
So to my point. One version of Office works fine. Yes. To different versions hardly work at all.
And their is no telling what the differences is, or have you can avoid the trouble of encountering them.
And yes, I know you can choose "Save as... (Word 95,3,2,....-file) every time you need to communicate with other versions, but how can you know what version the recipient will have, and what design/flow-coontrol-features will be disabled when you save in an older format?
Office, kinda like Windows, like things very homegeneous.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I'm glad someone acknowledges two facts in one statement: Office is an important application and Office keeps people on their platform.
If this is not acknowledged, it can't be properly addressed. Next time you say "it's just marketing" or whatever other BS on Office's success, realize you're not doing yourself and your favorite alternative Office program a favour.
Allow me to rant a bit on what's needed to get people (companies) to replace Windows and Office...
The big challenge is that apart from having to be every bit as good as Office, the working environment should also be better.
I think with KOffice and OpenOffice, Linux has two excellent candidates, KOffice for the more simplestupid crowd (me and most people although most won't admit it) and OpenOffice for the "power user". For obvious reasons though, they should be 100% interoperateble. Even if features are not fully supported, they should not result in document hell.
Right now, in a lot of environments you can't do away with MSOffice. Find out why (without resorting to arrogant BS) and fix it. Sometimes it's easy: a few people are seriously into Powerpoint, and the company distributes them to others. Well, that's enough reason not to switch.
But also, apart from having the clip art, dictionaries, etc etc etc all that stuff, there might be a lot of things that arguably are outside the scope of the software, but need to be looked into in order to fulfill the full productivity cycle people are running now with MSOffice.
Their Office runs on their OS and they don't really differentiate. So if you can map the whole experience and make that good, only then you can claim to be able to replace the desktop.
The same goes for the Gimp btw. If you already *have* Photoshop, there is not ONE single reason to go to Gimp.
Disclaimer: This mail not to make things seem easy or to in any way berate Linux developers (bless you) but in response to the many derogative remarks here on MSOffice.
Comparison: SCO is not being beaten up and undressed by "Fuck You" comments but by a bunch of highly skilled lawyers - and appropriately the Groklaw crowd.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Best of all its EASY to author. (Well, once you've done one anyway.)
However, I'm finding more and more places that only want stuff in MS Word format. And in my university everything, and I mean everything, is in MS Word format. No other format is allowed. Not PDF, not PS, not even RTF in many cases. And sure as hell no text, sgml/xml/html or TeX. A while back I got a list of people, email, phone numbers etc that the department circulated. Not in csv format which would be the most sensible. Not in XML which would have been flexible and useful. Not in Excel format which could have been useful. In Word format. Completely useless.
And the CS department teaches computer literacy. Which translates to "Demonstrate that you can use MS Office".
I thought I read something that said the latest MS Office license REQUIRED that you run it only on Windows, therefore making anyone running it through Crossover Office a license violator. That's not so big an issue for a home user, unless MS stoops to the depths of the RIAA, but for a corporate installation, with a public presence and possibly thousands of licenses, it's a huge issue.
Of course, I could be wrong about the license clause. We're still running Office97 for the time being.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I'm using KDE 3.2 (which shouldn't matter) on an Dell Dimension 4600 with 1280MB of RAM (thanks to a mistake by the ordering department). I don't doubt your numbers, and they seem in line with others I've heard, but they're certainly far different than my local results.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Example:
My dads truck has a FAR higher TCO than my moms car. Cost twice as much, the systems are so much more complicated it breaks more often simply due to having more parts. It burns so much more fuel that even though deisel is cheaper these days its miles per dollar are lower.
On the other hand, if my dad tried using my moms car for what he uses his truck for, he wouldn't even get out of the driveway.
TCO is only part of the story, what you need the system for is another... so generalized TCO is not very useful. Its only useful when comparing narrowly defined usage scenarios- like with cars, it would be relevant to compare TCO of the Hyundai Elantra and the Honda Civic for the purposes of transporting passengers. But some of the TCO comparisons I've seen are more like comparing the Hyundai Elantra and a Dodge 350 truck for the purposes of doing everything automobiles are capable of doing. Completely irrelevant.