Mac v. Microsoft TCO

NickFitz writes "MacWorld UK has some comments from industry analysts on the question of whether Total Cost of Ownership, Microsoft's favourite metric, is lower for Apple Mac versus Windows. The MS website has no figures to refute the claim that 'An Apple technician may cost twice as much, but he comes to see you half as often.'" Bottom line: neither platform is the clear winner.

Comments

My snappy comeback

[Fished]

My snappy comeback to those who claim Macs are more expensive is:

That's right, they are more expensive if your time has no value.

That usually elicits at least a thoughtful look. With that line as a starting point, I've converted three organizations over to Macs in the past 2 years, so it's got something going for it.

great.

[pb]

So here's a story that outright says "we have no idea, and the whole thing is bogus anyhow".

Well, at least it's honest.

Lower TCO, higher ROI?

[rqqrtnb]

Is a Mac cheaper to run and does a Mac make a user more productive?

If the answer is yes, does it really matter?

More importantly, does ANYBODY in corporate America consider this when buying their machines? I'll betcha, TCO means buying a "reliable" PC that's not made of crappy generic parts, and nowhere does a Mac come into the equation, even though it might very well be the better choice.

ROI means handing that machine down the line from programmers to office support, to milk as much out of it until it heads for a landfill, and nobody figures out how productive their people are on the thing during its lifetime.

Why? Because there's really no choice. Not in any practical sense.

So, it's really about how well a machine runs Windows, not how Windows compares to any other OS. That's because the market perception is that "the battle is over and Windows won." We feel enough anxiety about upgrading our machines, adding new software. To open up the decision process to worrying about entire platforms again ... just ain't gonna happen now.

So Apple finds itself in a tough spot, appealing to those who want to "switch" in hopes that if it can gain enough market share and mind share, it can pry open the door of possibility eventually.

But it's going to be almost impossible, not because Apple can't offer a better product, but because people have become so shellshocked from the PC/Internet experience that they just want to settle down and go with the flow... the Windows flow.

So when I saw the above article, I thought to myself that even if Apple were to offer irrefutable truth to lower TCO/higher ROI, how much would it really, really matter?

Not much, unfortunately. Not right now. But perhaps, little by little...

Re:Lower TCO, higher ROI?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is amazing is the dichotomy. In so many facets of corporate america we always hear how "bottom line" oriented today's corporations are.

Yet, when it comes to computers, it hardly seems that the lower bottom line cost matters. Almost as if computers have a different yardstick.
But why should they? The current "standard platform" only means one kind of PC which translates into lower costs since there is one company to look to for support, the OEM of your computers. But it still is not the most cost effective solution.

It is as if you had Chevy's in your corporate fleet and to lower costs, you standardized on something else, that cost less to buy, but got 1/3 less gas mileage and more maintenance.

Tired...

[Apreche]

I'm tired of all these slashdot stories that all have the same answer. The right tool for the right job. If you are screwing in screws you need a screwdriver. If you are hammering nails you need a hammer. If you want to buy hammers to screw screws it will probalby work, but with all the screws you bend it will cost more money and vice versa too.

There is a best selection of hardware and software under a given circumstance. There is no way to say that linux is cheaper than windows, period. There might be a guy who gets linux for free, but he runs weird hardware and would have to hire someone to write a driver. Windows might be cheaper for that guy. There might be an artist who already has a copy of photoshop for mac, but not for windows. A G5 might be cheaper for that guy. TOS can only be determined on a case by case basis.

The rule of right tool for the right job applies to so many slashdot stories I don't know if it's still worth posting it every time I see it. So next time someone says "my programming language is better than yours" or "this wireless protocol is better than that one" or "this software is cheaper/better than that one" point them here.

Bashing MS isn't worth my intellectual integrity

[orthogonal]

The MS website has no figures to refute the claim that 'An Apple technician may cost twice as much, but he comes to see you half as often.'

Yeah, and the article was no figures to support that claim.

"In this coooorner, Anecdote, ladies and gentlemen! And in the opposite coooorner, Another Anecdote! Truly this will be the inconclusive fight of the century! Roarrr! Yeaaaaarrg!"

Sure Microsoft sucks, but it doesn't suck so much that I'm going to sacrifice honestly reasoning from real evidence for the sake of becoming a zealot able to bash Microsoft even in the face of no conclusive evidence one way or the other.

But, uh, thanks for offering me the chance.

But I have many brands of tools...

[csoto]

Trust me, my Wiha tools are FAR better than the "junk drawer" tools I lend to my neighbors. As both a Mac fan and woodworker, I've learned that it does not pay, in terms of time, hassle or quality of work to use "any old tool." If I'm shaving a piece off the bottom of a door, I'll grab a decent Stanely hand plane. For fine furniture, nothing beats my Lie-Nielsens, which at over 8x the cost, are well worth it.

Mac and Windows PCs do essentially the same things. There are a jillion more crappy games available for WIndows, but the good ones are on both. My G4 is an excellent gaming platform, plus it lets me talk to my friends, family and even get work done. My G4 Powerbook, even more so. I could do the same things my Dell, but the experience just isn't the same. Ergo, the Mac is a "better quality tool" for me.

TCS (Total Cost of Sanity)

[chia_monkey]

It's funny that this debate still rages on and I'm sure it will for some time to come. While some may say "ok, it's time to stop talking about it", I disagree. I'm sure the TCO race is much closer now than it was a decade ago when Macs were rather flaky and there's wasn't as much hard core business and research software for the Mac, thus making it rather useless for non-creatives and such.

Now for the sanity issue...time definitely has a value that nobody seems to take into account here. Same with sanity. For instance, with the PC you're constantly looking for drivers and DLLs that you need, that break, that disappear, that need to be updated, etc. With the Mac...it just WORKS. Any of you have a girlfriend that has a PC and it's constantly not working and YOU get all the abuse because of it? Then you suggest using a Mac because it simply works ("Look, all you gotta do is plug in your digital camera, and it works. And now you can view the pictures with no additional software. And check this out...you can burn them onto a CD now with no additional software..."). It really is that easy. I know if my gf had a PC, I would be a lot more sane from not having to listen to "great, I can't use my camera now because it changed the settings to HP instead of Sony and I can't find the software..."

Sanity...it's a good thing. Just as "goodwill" isn't a concrete number to put on a company's spreadsheet, it still has a value. Same with the value of time and sanity. Let's not forget that.

110 macs == less work than 15 ms boxes

[SgtChaireBourne]

I find it hard to believe that there is any speculation. I've seen two technicians take care of 110 macintoshes with less time than they spend repairing the 15 windows machines remaining.

Then there is the Total Cost of Sanity that many have mentioned. The Macs just work, but more importantly they are pre-installed. At a conference spanning several days, the first day and a half it looked any participant with a note book computer was runing either an iBook or a PowerBook. By the end of the week the ratio of Mac to Windows had droped to about 1:1 -- the Windows users had averaged about 20 minutes each with a technician to get the wireless cards working.

Mac just work, but more importantly they are pre-installed. The common Linux distros are very easy to install and maintain since about 4 years ago, especially compared to Windows. But having OS X work out of the box beats even Linux and really creams Windows. When you start talking about corrective maintenance, then you couldn't pay me to put up with the garbage that I've had to watch Windows technicians deal with. However, the end user, not the technician is the real benefactor of OS X. They can use the computer for their job rather than having to call twice a week about problems which prevent daily activities.