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.' "

Comments

Re:Um, yeah

[Shaper_pmp]

Seconded. In addition, although it's not quite as overt as the other hatchet-jobs she's written, there were still a couple of things in it that made me wonder. For example:

"Microsoft's Latest News about Microsoft Windows commands 65 to 70 percent of the server operating system market, while the Linux Latest News about Linux share stands at 15 to 20 percent."

Is this true? It's very, very different to the figures I normally se quoted - does it take into account the fact that you can generally run many more "servers" on a linux box than a windows box? (Translates into artificially inflated numbers of Windows boxes sold, to run the same number of actual "server" programs).