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Ret. World Bank CTO on Desktop Linux TCO Facts
comforteagle writes "W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction."
When you buy into the Microsoft platform, you are buying endless upgrades for years on end.
When a user bought Windows 3.1, they also unwittingly bought Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows ME, and Windows XP. This is planned obsolescense for no other reason except to keep Micorsoft shareholders happy.
With Linux, you avoid that ridiculous problem.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Too bad this kind of analysis didn't make it into the anti-trust cases....
IDIOT!
He's talking about corporate purchases; where the company buys off the shelf, simply re-buying "their standard configuration" each time another cubicle needs filling. These kinds of customers don't build their PC from bits, you fool!
And they DO worry about tiny differences in price; because they get multiplied out by the hundreds of boxes getting bought by the whole company.
Get a brain before using your keyboard, FFS.
And you seem to be ignoring the fact that no corporation in existence is going to start building their own computers from components. The added labour costs make this the least cost effective alternative.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
We're talking about TCO - Total Cost of Ownership. It takes time and effort to create an install and then mirror it to a hundred systems. The business pays for that time and effort. Even if it's an in house tech doing the job, at the very least his salary for the time spent doing the install should be factored into the cost.
And it's hardly a win for Linux to say that Linux is not more expensive than Windows. If we can't show a cost savings for Linux, it's a win for Redmond.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
-cost of Anti-Virus software (that slows the system down)
-cost of anti-spyware solutions. Typically you need two or more cleaners to get the most common ones.
-cost of downtime. Typical desktop PC in a business is down for most of a day many times a year.
-cost of the forced upgrade cycle.
-On top of that, Windows comes with NOTHING bundled. Everything costs extra. Just managing the licenses in a corporate environment is pain!
Add to this the much bigger probability of data loss and theft, and the Windoze solution does not seem like a solution at all.
Bandaid over duct tape. Legacy crap is what keeps people using Win32, there are no other sane reasons.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I would agree that most industries don't look to change platforms or migrate software packages. All it would take is for the demand to exist for the supply of strongly-supported apps to be developed.
Another thought is that with web-enablement of apps, platform independence is that much closer to being an option. And web apps have *definitely* come a long way to providing much of the functionality we have had for some time in regular apps.
Give it a few years, and those web apps will make desktop platform indpendence a reality. You can still program however you choose, and your servers can be whatever you need them to be.
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Unfortunately, the article is very true.
It can be difficult to get pre-installed Linux desktop.
Servers, though, a totally different matter. Here you can make really large savings. Especially when you consider that you don't need all those CALs. Compare a Windows Server 2003 running Windows Terminal Server and having 20 Windows XP desktops connecting to it, to a completely Linux Desktop OS and Linux Server OS solution, and you're biggest saving is in the server area. Heck, according to this article the Linux Server / Windows Desktop would be the cheapest solution!
Actually, I think it's you who's missing the point. First off, to get it out of the way, I hate MS, I use Linux at home, blah blah blah.
Anyway... have you ever worked for a large company, say, a bank or large corporate office, with procurement policies? I think you haven't, otherwise you would know that just telling them "Just buy a couple hundred motherboards, HDD's, CPU's, RAM sticks, cases, monitors, keyboards and mice and have your techie guy working in the basement put them together for you over your lunch break and install Linux on them." just ain't gonna fly. They are large companies, they do business, their business is not computers, but they need computers to run their business, so they look for other large companies that assure them that they are getting solid computers that will get the job done. They're going to buy Dell, or HP, or IBM. They are *not* going to show up at Bob's Discount Linux Shop and order a couple hundred desktops. And they are not going to give their one IT guy back in the server room a pile of components. They are going to go with a large supplier who will deliver a bunch of pre-built, pr-econfigured machines that they can plug into their network, put their username and password in, and get to work.
As for mom and dad and grandma, you try telling them to buy the components and build it themselves. Or telling them to go to Bob's Discount Linux Shop when they can get the same computer with an OS they allready know, and often for a couple hundred dollars less thanks to the discounts the big companies offer that small shops just can't match. They want a computer thay can buy, plug in, and start sharing pictures. They don't know, or care, about Linux or wether it's better/cheaper/sexier. They didn't buy a windows machine. They bought a Dell.
The point the guy makes in the article is completely valid: Unless and until large suppliers like Dell/HP/IBM make computers preconfigured with some flavour of Linux available, and make them cheaper than a comparable Windows box, then Linux will never be 'cheaper' or 'free' to the 99% of people out there who aren't geeks like us.
As a bit of background on me, I also work with Windows 2000-2003 *and* Linux servers for a living, in an environment where we have all our outward-facing machines running Linux and acting as webservers/webapp servers/firewalls/VPN server, and inside the network itself we've got several Windows 2000 and 2003 servers running Active Directory, Exchange, and several proprietary apps that require a server component running on a Windows NT-variant, and a client component running on a Windows desktop. Point is, I work with both Windows and Linux servers and desktops on a daily basis, I have some idea what I'm talking about.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
no you are wrong.
a VERY large company can get much better pricing without windows and from DELL.
He may be a smart guy but he is making some really DUMB mistakes trying to get TCO information.
NO corperation on this planet goes to Dell's website and configures up a computer, and presses the "order 10,000" button. you call a personal Sales Associate.
That is what I did, his first quote was in line with the article until I threw the quote back at them saying, "not good enough, HP is mre than willing to do what it takes to get our business, that includes not charging us for windows."
The quote came back over $250.00 per machine lower and the line that mentioned XP pro was actually removed from the quotation.
The machines arrived with no OS.
Maybe when the author of the article starts thinking and acting like how a company will get their PC's then we will get a fail TCO.
Until then he is acting like joe-blow off the street looking for 1 pc, and this is not the way to get a fair TCO.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nonsense.
We just have to point out the fact that most larger businesses throw away the bundled OEM-XP-home licenses anyway because they have their own licenses (which of course would no longer be needed if you have Linux).
And of course smaller businesses tend to buy whitebox or cheap systems which can be often had without Linux.
The trouble is as a not-very-large company ordering 70 workstations, this just doesn't happen. We have to pay for Windows.
However, since we have a corporate volume license from $PARENT, and we have an image we've built with our software load, we essentially pay for Windows TWICE - once on the pre-install which we don't use, then software rental on the corporate install.
The other TCO problem with Windows is in imaging. With a Windows image, all the machines have to be identical for the image to work or you get all sorts of interesting driver issues. Manufacturers keep changing their specs. You can get the same model of PC from HP and find it has a different NIC and a different chipset and a different video card even though it's apparently the same. With a Linux image, it seems so long as you've got the module, it just works without complaining. With a Windows image, the best you get is many "Found new hardware" dialogues (and the driver install may or may not work, and you have to sometimes feed it disks which is kind of missing the point of a hard disk image). Sometimes you get a machine that won't even boot. Windows is a royal pain for machines built from hard disk images unless you can make sure all your machines are identical.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
>>Then we have things such as Exchange, which at first everyone will swear that they need because it has integrated scheduling functions, despite the fact that most corporations hardly ever use the functionality, except for one or two very annoying people who are quickly ignored by everyone else (if you are one of those people, think of that statement as humor). Here is where the price starts getting steep.
I wonder how you could come to this conclusion, but must assume you haven't been around many medium- to large corporate Windows networks. I have, and let me tell you - - scheduling in Outlook, not only for meetings, but also for resources (like conference rooms) and employee vacations, training, etc., was one of the most heavily used feature sets in Exchange. Many companies and small offices rely on the free/busy scheduling facility so much that all employees are REQUIRED to keep their calendars up to date so that management will know the availablity of any colleague at a glance. And I can assure you that, if it weren't for this functionality in Exchange, OSS mail and calendar software would have penetrated much more deeply into corporate American than it has thus far. I've been able to bring Apache, PHP, and MySQL to my current employer's server room, but they will NEVER break away from Outlook/Exchange in the course of my career, I'm sure.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Dell is also a good company for this. You're probably thinking, why should I buy an agreement like this from Microsoft when I have no choice but to pay for the Windows license from Dell? Dell will work with you. Once they verify you have a VLA with Microsoft, they will deduct the cost of the Windows license(s) form your order.
Now speaking from experience, all preloaded machines are CRAP! Dell loads all kinds of "tools" on their default install (this also means never use their restore cd's either). Take 2 machines, load one by hand with a vanilla XP cd and load the other with the Dell XP cd. Once in Windows check out the Services list. Surprised? There's a lot of unnecessary services and also programs preinstalled, which over time, will make the system unstable. I learned the hard way. I started off using the Dell loads until I noticed a pattern in BSOD's and crashes. Then I started a standardized imaging system with the base images being done by hand with a vanilla XP cd. No more random crashes...
I have noticed, however, that sometimes the DellTech will ask you to boot to the Diag partition (a supersmall FAT partiton they put at the beginning of the hard drive with diagnostic utilities) for error codes and such. Blow that partition away. You don't need it. I've made it a habit that before I call a DellTech, I boot to the Diagnostic cd for that system (each system has it's own (GX260, GX270, Latitude D600, etc.)) and write down every error code it spits out. This will greatly speed up your call time and get your machine fixed very quickly.
If nothing else, I hope people who have to work with such machines have learned 2 things:
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Microsoft is paying the vendor to make computers cheaper with windows. It is just part of the packaging like the styrofoam padding, plastic bags and box. Just throw away windows with the rest of the packaging.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.