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A New Look at Linux vs. Windows TCO
An anonymous reader writes "Laura DiDio, research fellow at the Yankee Group, published a column this morning in which she discusses key findings from a new survey on the total cost of ownership of Windows vs. Linux. DiDio often is written off by the Linux camp as being pro-Microsoft, but she offers excellent, neutral advice for any IT department considering a fundamental systems switch: 'If you do not know what is on your network, if you cannot at least estimate the hourly, monthly or yearly cost of downtime, if you do not know how long it takes to recover from a security outage, if you cannot answer questions about the extent of your company's license compliance, then you cannot truly evaluate whether Linux, Windows or Unix is right for your business. Chances are, if you cannot answer most or all of those questions, it does not matter what operating system you have because ignorance of the core TCO tenets means that your business is not getting the most out of its networks.' "
"but she offers excellent, neutral advice"
The person who wrote this has not been reading her other work. Neutral isnt even on the map.
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DiDio often is written off by the Linux camp as being pro-Microsoft
Um, well, yes, with good reason. When someone performs public relations work for a large corporation on a long-term basis, one then needs to recognize that further publications by this person should be recognized to certainly be further public relations work for the same corporation. As a side note, one might also consider any TCO studies published by Red Hat Corporation to be somewhat biased.
There were no real "key findings" in the article. Is it really worthy of Slashdot to mention a survey whose outcome was "well, it depends"? Never mind that, was it really worth writing the original article?
Either the author had nothing better to write about, or they felt like inflating their ego a little by assuming that people in business are pretty thick and need to be told the blindingly obvious.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Zotob Worm Hits CNN and Goes Global
Windows 2000 machines are infected. Linux and Unix aren't.
I clearly see what that woman means.
Seriously, anyone who doesn't even have a clue how much their systems are costing them are only ever going to make it worse - and more expensive - by randomly moving to another platform because someone's friend told them it was free. Anyone making such kneejerk reactions without the figures also has a high probability of being a moron that makes anything they touch turn to sh*t anyway, making it doubly worse.
In essence - if you don't even know what you're doing with what you have, don't make it worse by changing it to something else that's so different.
I don't know if MS should be pointing this out in their marketing though - one one hand it's inherently true and a great way for them to fight the leaks to OSS - but it's also pointing out to the majority of customers that they're stupid.
Regardless of what the original poster thought, she does not supply neutral advice. If anything, what I see here is an attempt to appear neutral, but throwing in veiled threats.
Windows commands 65 to 70 percent of the server operating system market, while the Linux share stands at 15 to 20 percent
What market? What segments? What percentage of computing power? When you say MS runs 65% of the market you imply (and this is where Laura also gets here reputation) that everything else is a marginalized entity.
The high-level findings show that there is no universal clear-cut TCO basis to compel the corporate masses to do a wholesale switch from Windows to Linux
Gee, one machine, operating system, language, et. el. does not meet all needs. And this was insight? To whom? If anything this should be more concerning to MS, but it is also a plug for MS (as the owners of the market). But she follows it up with:
The majority of wholesale defections to Linux continues to come at the expense of midrange Unix installations...
The we see her drive home the MS competes with its own products (because they are just so good you need not upgrade), while Linux competes with its poorly defined systems, lack of support and array of distributions.
But, contrary to what the headlines would have us believe, the biggest threat to Microsoft's continued dominance, at present, is not Linux. It is older versions of Windows. The biggest threat to Linux is not Microsoft, but rather integration and interoperability issues among the various Linux and open-source distributions and applications. The lack of enterprise-level application support and documentation for the aforementioned software packages also is an issue.
Sorry but this is typical DiDio, with some enhanced editing to ensure it give the appearance of being unbiased. But she hit all the MS talking points.