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Australian TCO Study: Linux Wins Again
An anonymous reader writes "An updated Linux vs Windows TCO study has found that a 250-seat company can end up saving 36 percent if it were to equip its users with the open source operating system and applications that run on it."
It would be interresting to see the results of a similar study when applied to a company with a much larger number of employees. Would the results be similar in a world-wide company with 10.000 employees located in different countries?
Note for slashdot bias fans: "Linux wins again" is actually in the story in the link, rather than a bit of spin on the part of everyone's favourite news site :)
This is for the PHBs who take this sort of thing seriously.
http://www.cybersource.com.au/about/linux_vs_windo ws_tco_comparison.pdf
Linked to in the article.
but the Microsoft adverts on Slashdot keep telling me that Linux has a higher TCO...?!?
But you underestimate the staffing issues there. Firing all your MSFT IT guys and hiring new "LinuxCompatible" admins is a big pain for most companies. Of course you fire 3 Win32 admins and hire one Linux admin by default :)
For a new startup, a Linux desktop is invaluable , especially if you have a couple of in-house developers who use it regularly. That's where linux is slowly creeping into the desktop - not in the big companies with million dollar CTOs and kickbacks from Microsoft.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
what if the company is a partner of the microsoft and is working on security issues in IE ? This is a generalised statement. It depends on the needs of the company. Neither MS nor the Linux group would be bothered by this.
It is very interesting the assumptions that they state have been made to bias this report in Microsoft's favour.
Wow!
Every TCO study I have seen into the cost benefits of Linux over Windows, and vice versa, seem to all be flawed. They are always paid for by someone with a vested interest in getting one "answer" or another. How can they be taken seriously... it's like going to Sun and IBM and saying "Whose hardware is better?"... I wonder what answer each company would give.
I'm tired of all this TCO crap. I know that they are just doing it to offset some of the "studies" that Microsoft has funded, but I wish linux groups would focus on something else.
In fact, I wish Microsoft would focus on something else. It's funny, but *cost* isn't something that seems to be a strength of MS. They should focus on their strengths (like consistent interface that everyone knows, massive hardware support, number of applications available, good multimedia support, etc). They have a lot going for them. Why do they always focus on the thing that they don't have going for them!!!!
--End rant.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
No, the outcome and confidence is great. It says "Even if we did everything we possibly could to sway things in the Windows direction, and ignored a bunch of Windows' costs, Linux is still cheaper".
Still cheaper. You can't necessarily put numbers on the price of spyware and reboots, but whatever that number is, Linux is cheaper than it already. It is not a case of "Linux is free if your time has no value" - it's that "even if you value your time at 3 times the price that you would on Windows, you are still better off".
Linux has a much higher cost of 0wn3rship. Windows is much cheaper to 0wn.
Skippy has a point, but...
TCO studies are just standard business cost estimation models, with assumptions chosen by the authors of the study. Most of the models are pretty good, in theory, with sound reasoning and empirically-supportable construction. If they didn't work, or if they tended to provide misleading results when applied properly, why would businesses use them at all?
The problem is with the assumptions. Give me any financial model, from cost estimation to marketing models to arbitrage scenarios, and I can plug assumptions into it that will give any result you want. The models are fine, but the results are "the pits", as it were, unless the assumptions are carefully and honestly chosen.
This isn't to say that a TCO model, even with well-chosen assumptions, can provide an incredible amount of precision, but it CAN provide accuracy of result. That's what REALLY pisses me off about this article--they're quoting numbers to a whole percent, when it's pretty obvious that the precision of the result isn't anywhere near %10. If the article is to be believed, they're using intentionally pessimistic assumptions in order to bias the study against F/OSS, and still coming out with F/OSS on top. They're acknowledging that they can't bring supportable, precise assumptions into it!
So really, the study is saying "F/OSS is cheaper than MS by a good margin, but our precision is shitty enough that our actual number doesn't mean much. It might be %37 cheaper, it might be %80 cheaper, or it might be %1 cheaper--but we're pretty sure it's cheaper."
I guess it's like that old joke, where the museum guest asks the tour guide "How old are these dinosaur bones?" The guide says "The bones are 2 million and 10 years old." The guest, astonished, exclaims "That's amazing! How can we know the age so precisely, when it's that old?"
The guide responds, "Well, it was 2 million years old when I started working here, and I've been working here for 10 years."
Seriously, they really may be. They are mostly so powerful because their dominance has been self-sustaining. Everyone uses Word and Internet Explorer, because everyone else uses them, and documents are made with no concern for people with different software preferences. Word and IE tie people to Windows.
But the tide is changing. IE marketshare is falling. According to some reports, about a fifth of surfers use alteranitve browsers. That gives serious reason to make websites that work with other browsers (yes, that means you, gmail).
People are increasingly eager to abandon Windows. It's funny that lately, many of my non-CS friends have started learning to work with Linux, and it's mostly the people who think they can handle their computers who stick to Windows.
Of course, there are still applications that will tie people to Windows. However, if people actually attempt to switch, they will learn which applications and file formats cause problems, and be more open to using alternatives. I've seen this happen in several places.
Now, all this is not to say that Microsoft will go down (I personally believe they will at least survive, if not prosper). However, now that their dominance is starting to slip, there are serious opportunities for competitiors to establish themselves in the market.
And they're trying. The other day, I heard a Novell ad advocating open source on the radio. Even if they are the only one now, where one leads, others will follow.
What would really kill Microsoft's deathgrip would be if a competitor not only did the same things better, but also offered features that Microsoft doesn't. Two examples would be efficient use of metadata (a la BeOS; this is being worked on by all camps) and truly interactive web applications (like XAML promises; Java and XUL are just not good enough).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Given all the bias in their study, I can't assume 36% is even close to the real number.
Correct, 36% is far lower than the real number. This is a GOOD thing, so why are you complaining?
In any moderately complex field, you can't get everyone to agree that the same assumptions are true, and yet you can't even attempt to make predictions without selecting some assumptions to work from. So you take your pick, tell people what you chose, and if they disagree with your result, they can adjust it accordingly.
Consider the problem of the world's dwindling oil supply. People don't agree on how much oil exists underground, or how fast consumers will burn it. But I can make a generous assumption about quantity (twice what the USGS says) and stingy about usage (no increase over current rates), and compute that we run out in 100 years. Since any other likely assumptions will give a worst number, this "bad best case" prediction is a fine starting point to discuss long-term plans.
They never said it was 36%, the article seems to state that 36% is the lower bound becuase of the bias in Microsoft's favour. If you tip something in another person's favour it's definitely not going to be lower. That said, I haven't actually read the PDF.
So why aren't we still using IBM products if no one ever got fired for buying them?
Did anyone ever take into account what it costs to install a critical patch on every system in the enterprise and have to reboot each machine afterwards? I guess you need large numbers to compute the costs of such an operation in bigger corporations.
Now, how often would you have to do that on which OS?
Tell that news to someone working in photoshop or dreamweaver or programming windows apps for living (something like 70% of programmers are developing for windoze now, today).
Yeah Linux needs bigger market share and it will do good to all of us but TCO for many companies tied to an OS by definition makes no sense at all.
take setting up a new website:
"oh - there's a GUI tool for that... if you installed the right package... did you pick gnome or KDE?... X isn't starting? it might just be easier to modify the .conf file with Pico... don't have that? try vi - httpd.conf should be under /etc/httpd - unless you..."
Any idiot (like myself) can fumble through doing this stuff on Windows.
Security? Go to Windowsupdate.com once a month and install all the patches. I wish I had as straight forward a solution for my Linux boxes.
don't get me wrong - I want to see open source crush microsoft - it's just there's some significant work that needs to be done on the usability / supportability front.
The biggest short term win in TCO will come when the organisation is of such a size and complexity that it really only needs 1(one) committed open systems evangelist to drive through change. What slows down change in most organisations is the fact that most of the workers (and managers...) are not hugely intelligent - even in IT - and oppose anything that involves change or learning.
If this is right, OSS will only really start to gain momentum where smaller companies which are adopters gain a competitive advantage that enables them to grow faster than the competition. Although IT is only a few percent of the business, a large saving in IT can make a considerable difference to the net profit - but it needs to be a large saving as a percentage of IT costs to make a real impact.
This is good news for call centres and bad news for heavy industry. It would be a pity if OSS is associated in most people's minds with the modern version of cotton picking rather than high tech, but that could be the outcome.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
There was a time when 0wn3rship by spam bots were not even considered a problem because everyone was on dialup anyway. More recently with the coming of broadband and lots of stupid users to the internet - that has become the major headache (ie spyware, malware and trojans are local issues, spam bots are bigger).
It's a real cost when the ISP cuts you off or sends you a fat bandwidth billQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
One of the things these studies never take into account is productivity. I was a windows user for about 8 years and my productivity had completely platue'd out. For the last 6 months I have been using slackware and suddenly my productivity is increasing at a rapid rate - much more than I'd ever be able to do on a windows box.
I think you need to remember, that, 10 year olds are versatile. The average business professional is set in their ways, and doesn't like change. That's why they work in the office, and not elsewhere. They don't think anything like a 10 year old. Very few 10 year olds are locked into their systems.
TFA stated explicitly that Open Source _is_ cheaper, by quite a margin.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
No, it is most useful as an internal evaluation tool. A company with limited resources (ie all companies) may not want to research every new technology to see if they could lower their TCO by implementing it. They might want some kind of reason to believe it is cheaper before they commit to spending on an internal evaluation. This doesn't mean that an external TCO evaluation is the only one they will have.
Windows: Press CTRL+ALT+DEL, type your username (if not filled in automaticly) and type your password.
Linux: Type your username (if not filled in automaticly) and type your password.
Training: 10 seconds: 'This is the new login screen'
Windows: Click on some world or web or 'e' icon to get internet explorer, use urls, home, back and forward buttons.
Linux: Click on soome world or web or wathever icon to get an Firefox window, use urls, home, back and forward buttons.
Training: 20 seconds: 'Click on this icon instead of the old one (the one that says INTERNET), further browsing is the same.'
Windows: Click on the word icon and type your text, click on the excel icon and fill your sheet.
Linux: Click on the swriter icon and type your text. Click on the scalc icon and fill your sheet.
Training: again pointing out the new icons.
We just covered the training for 90% of all desktop users. They simply don't know or need more.
It gets interesting when you get to the artists or the real power users but they are generally a minority or have enough brains to figure most out themselves.
Further you can swap fileservers, dns, proxies, printservers and webservers in you company wihtout this 90% even noticing.
For this 90% training is mostly comforting them to make sure they don't panic when they hear something is going to change.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Children have the urge to learn and to try new things, for no other reason then they don't worry about a bad outcome, because any outcome is thrilling to them.
Case in point is videogames. A child is definately going to pick up how a videogame works without any prior experience easier than a 30+ year old who has never touched them.
This is not to say that being cautious is terrible, but in this situation it is prohibitive to change.
Also, he doesn't have his boss riding him every 15 minutes to get those figures for Jennings.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
TCO is a PHB metric. Managers who don't understand the role of technology in their organization view technology as a necessary evil and want to keep the cost as low as possible.
Before looking at TCO, managers should looks at:
- how much IT increases productivity
- how much IT cuts costs in other parts of the company
These metrics are notoriously hard to measure while TCO is mostly contained within the IT budget and so is easier to calculate. An astute office politician can claim some benefits just by reducing his IT costs while ignoring the effects on the rest of the organization.However, the big gains are outside IT. If IT offers a mere 1% increase in productivity in the organization as a whole it would dwarf any savings in IT costs. If IT isn't providing those types of benefits annually, it is doing something very wrong.
Return on investment, not TCO, is a better measurement of value. Businesses that think they can cost-cut their way to success are generally doomed anyway.
If you get past that, the inclusion of Fedora Core 2 as an OS option should stop you in your tracks.
And if you manage to get past that, the needless use of, for example, enterprise versions of Windows 2003 Server should be the final indicator at how flawed their methods are.
Am I the only one wondering when we're going to see a TCO study involving the use of Mac OS? Surely there has to be some cost savings in reduced downtime and administration with using a Mac...
Identify the functionality that each of those provides and WHY it is necessary for an administrator.
Only then can you compare/contrast the two platforms.I don't see anyone claiming that.
Here's an example: Package management.
On Debian, it is ultra-simple. And every file belongs to a package and that is controlled by the package management system.
On Windows, there isn't any system-based link between the files and what package installed them. Any package can update any file.
This becomes important when you're managing multiple workstations. With Debian, it is trivial to verify files to packages and packages between machines to troubleshoot a problem.
With Windows, it is far more difficult and usually results in the proverbial reboot, reload, re-install.
We've looked at Linux time and time again, and we've found that it works well as database and web servers, but we can't use it for much else.
This may change with Novell's Enterprise Server comming out in January.
Central user management with single sign-on? It's a pain in the butt right now on Linux. How does that impact TCO?
What about all our apps that don't run on Linux? Speech to Text stuff that always falls apart in Wine, special educational packages that aren't supported on Linux? That doesn't help the TCO analysis either.
We've got lots of hardware that won't EVER work in linux - network scanners, copiers and printers, raid controllers, CD-burners, network fax machines...etc. This isn't really Linux's fault - it's the hardware manufacturer's fault - but the TCO problem falls squarely on "Linux". Should we pay BIG bucks to replace all that hardware so we can save a little money on the OS?
These studies aren't very good for anything except "rallying the troops".
Those MS TCO studies that claim you only need 2 or 3 guys to support 15,000 windows users all over the world are also good for a laugh as well.
-ted
men, you are so right!.
.... training was a 2hr presentation to inform them about policies and procedures, and to just show them the Linux desktop and off they went to use the system and do their work.
We hired 15 new staff (50+ total) during the last 2 months; and guess what
Now, moving the initial 18+ staff over from Windows/Office/Outlook to Linux/OpenOffice/Evolution, that was a real pain; but now that we became a Linux shop, new staff fits just right in. People tends to give their best effort (and not complain that much) when they start a new job, don't they?
We still have some issues with crappy formatted MS-Word documents (frames instead of rows in a table, anyone?) or VB script ridden Spreadsheets we get from third parties, but our administrative assistants have become pretty good at "fixing" those documents if we need to keep using them in the future (Styles and the Navigator in OpenOffice make a breeze to work with large documents).
Now, what is important is to keep staff training going on a continuos basis, after all, you don't want people doing the same old same old on your shiny new system, and making the same formating errors, and creatring the same crappy Access type (pseudo)databases, or keeping mission critical data on (now)OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets, etc.
Erik.
We're talking about big multinational companies, so a lot of your evangelical strategies won't work, are inappropriate, aren't welcome and would get you fired. For example:
In Step One: I work in R&D and my Boss (in fact the whole food chain from me up) is a Ph.D. Physical Chemist, and despite the fact and he's got the message (he uses firefox at home, for example) he has no control (or interest) over what IT does and thus I would be preaching to choir. All of the desktops in the company are standardized (choice of 4 types) and locked down, no one has write privileges to the local drives or local admin rights. Running an application that is not approved is a fireable offense, So is modifying the registry, Running a P2P app, Running a server, and Bypassing security. Setting up and running a wireless network will result in the IT guys immediately, on discovery (random 802.11x sweeps), escort you out of the building. Need something different or package installed? It's no problem, but you can't do it, IT does it remotely.
In Step Two: Are you kidding me? They are not my servers to do anything with! I can not even enter the room they are in! They'd escort you out of the building.
Step Three... Back to the PHB thing, the head of IT does not live or work in the same country I do, he's never even been on site, there is no way I could drop anything on his desk and if I did, it would be extremely unwelcome because not only am I not in his field, he's never met me. BSA is meaningless to us, we have site licenses for Microsoft's, Adobe's, & PTC's entire portfolio (along with a pile of other's, it's a 48 page catalog) and we're big enough to say, piss off you can't come in and inspect (trade secrets, you know).
Step Four is the only thing you've said that makes sense or even vaguely doable, but it lacks a keyword: "Validated" and because of that would not considered.
So what does that leave me with? Only things in MY domain: Data Collection, Device Control, Device Firmware and Molecular modeling. Here I've done a fair job. I use SuSE linux on most of the data collection and machine control boxes. I use SuSE, Free-DOS and Win-XP to develop on. If you look under the skirts of a lot of our devices you find that only the older ones have custom kernels, while the newer ones run NetBSD or Linux.
I hope I haven't offended you or been overly negative, but a lot of OSS evangelists do NOT understand big companies. That's a large part of why we're still using Microsoft products.
Don't get me wrong, I want to believe!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Use Groupwise on novell servers. Install windows groupwise clients.
Get rid of ms office and install OO on windows desktops.
use NDS with windows client for your directory.
Install ifolder on windows desktops and instruct users to put all their documents in their ifolder.
Once the users are comfortable with groupwise, ifolder, and OO switch them over to linux running the same apps.
Smart and painless. The idea is to keep them on windows on the desktop until the end.
Note that products like NDS and groupwise are not open source, they are proprietary novell products.
evil is as evil does
There are several alternatives to exchange. Suse has one, there is also bill groupware, kolab and citadel.
Of course there are commercial software too such as groupwise, lotus notes, hp openmail, bynari etc.
Exchange is no longer a barrier.
evil is as evil does
So, Windows users may feel some frustration when your site moves to Linux, but any damage they do is strictly limited to themselves. And if some users prove truly inept, you can always set their accounts to run a limited set of applications, or indeed anything else you choose to meet your requirements.
Windows is like one of those elaborate but boring toys which you can only use for passive kinds of play. Linux and Unix are designed to be used like Lego. You're supposed to take the pieces and use them to create something. This does require a somewhat different mindset, and has different implications.
One consequence is the insight that a discussion concerning you the designer can imply a different person with not just different privileges but a different environment than you the user.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
For more information, see the section on TCO in "Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!". Basically, TCO is very sensistive to the specific environment and requirements. It's clear, though, that there are many cases where OSS/FS does have a lower TCO.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
After installing Linux, brace yourself for... (I've heard all these):
...etc, etc...
"I can't change the orientation of my document from portrait to landscape."
"I bought this new very cheap Lexmark all-in-one printer/scanner/fax..."
"I wanted to duplicate a worksheet in the workbook so I dragged and dropped it in the worksheet navigator and it doesn't work."
"I saved my document and emailed it to another company but they can't read it."
"I can't type a Euro symbol."
"How am I supposed to instant message?"
"The fonts are all wrong and the document looks funny."
"The document is password protected and I can't open it".
"This e-banking web site doesn't work."
"I clicked on the link on the web site and nothing happened."
"The web site says 'unsupported browser'."
"I clicked on the 'World Wide Web' icon and it said something about profiles."
"OpenOffice takes too long to load."
"I want to change my screen resolution."