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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 :)
It is very interesting the assumptions that they state have been made to bias this report in Microsoft's favour.
Wow!
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; }
Listen to me very very carefully.
TCO is all that matters.
Say it again kids.
TCO is all that matters.
A company makes a product. Technology is a means to an end. TCO is the TOTAL cost (in cash, lost sales, employee time, overhead) of the technology.
TCO includes: the cost to initially purchase the software, the cost in lost time as users and admins to learn new interfaces, the cost in paying employees in maintaining the system, the cost in purchasing obscure or less capable hardware supported by the technology, the cost in lost time in porting/writing/purchasing applications to run in the environment, and on and on.
TCO is NOT cost of purchase + cost of support. And it is also always an estimate because of so many variables it must encompass - that's why there are so many studies about TCO. It's an ambiguous metric.
TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters.
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.
A TCO is about all the cost. Installation, configuration, operation.
Yes, X can be a pain to start if it is not already configured. To release that job from the beginning users, many distributions now have hardware detection tools and configure X for you. I invite you to check most popular distributions that have been released since 1999.
On the other hand, I'm quite curious if you ever had to deal with a MS-Windows computer that crashed during the loading of the graphic card driver/window server/window manager. On GNU/Linux you have to use one of the many editors, surf for some references and write the proper parameters to a file. On MS-Windows, my own experience is that searching for information will mostly lead you to "my graphic card is not working" kinda-post, no extra help, that the only editor is EDIT, and that you have to be very lucky for the problem to be located in a file that EDIT can open and modify without totally destroying (ie: binaries are out of the question). Most knowledgeble MS-Windows user have an answer about this. Re-install.
Maybe its just me, but I prefer the option of 45 minutes from browsing for the information to the end of the problem, vs sitting in front of the computer for 1 hour(OS) 1 hour (Office Suite) 3 hours (archiving utility, acrobat, IM client and other favorite miscalineous utilities) watching the progress bar slowly moving.
Any idiot (like yourself) can do EXACTLY the same in GNU/Linux. Many GNU/Linux distributions target idiots just like yourself. Just to name one, Mandrake has a full set of utilities that will allow you to click your way to the configuration of your dreams.
And Webmin that will allow you to configure your machine from a browser.
And you still have access to the configuration files through text editors.
Security? make a cron job that check the security updates every night on your computer, and install them for you. You dont even need to go to some web site. You dont even need to wait a whole month to fix a hole.
Cron is too complex for you, again, just click your way to an updated system. Many distributions will inform you by email of every security update available, based on the software you have on your machine. Which mean you keep your OS _AND_ your applications up to date and bug free, rather than your OS and office suite.
Again, cron is a bit old school. I'm betting is most distribution do not offer you a clickable way to tell the update system to run at regular interval, its a matters of weeks before you see it.
I think you have listened to one too many bad opinion and are due to actually try it on your own. Go to www.distrowatch.com and get yourself a desktop distribution. I am saying desktop as you seem font of having kde/gnome and X. A desktop distribution would (Fedora/Mandrake/Suse/LInspire/many other) include hardware detection and configuration of the X server for you.
Try it up, its not longer 1999. And next time your system decide to play a trick on you, you will have an other option than watching countless progress bar as your only fix.
-ph