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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 :)
http://www.cybersource.com.au/about/linux_vs_windo ws_tco_comparison.pdf
Linked to in the article.
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
It is very interesting the assumptions that they state have been made to bias this report in Microsoft's favour.
Wow!
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.
Sounds like you need to be using Firefox, a free open source web browser... suitablly equipped with the Adblock extension. Then you wouldn't keep seeing the Microsoft adverts :-)
Not having to read the Microsoft adverts will therefore increase your productivity. Proof that Open Source software improves TCO!
return 0; }
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.
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/
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...
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.