Users Reject MS Independent Study Claims

PenguinCandidate writes "End users from various corners of the Web have whole-heartedly rejected Microsoft's claims that an independent TCO comparison between Linux and Windows would be something akin to the second coming. Said one senior Linux architect: 'With Linux and open source, it is possible to arrive in a position where the organization has increased control over its situation [and reduced] its long-term costs. That's a highly desirable outcome and I doubt we'll ever see a Microsoft-funded study which will come to that conclusion.'"

Comments

LOL News from the 1860's

[Crashmarik]

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)

But what is TCO anyway?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Suppose Microsoft demonstrates with a (real) independant study that Windows is, say, 30% less expensive than any other OS. Is it really all that counts? What if 5 years from now Microsoft pulls another one of its format-change trick and my company can't read the documents it produced 5 years ago reliably?

I'd say having control of your software, giving you better control over the data that is produced and a fighting chance against malware, as opposed to being enslaved to a software manufacturer, benevolent as it might appear to be, is a big part of the decision too. The problem can't be presented simply as a pure immediate or mid-term savings proposition. Possible loss of data, loss of services, and loss of business due to them are a big part of the equation, but of course it's not as easy to sell as "look, this costs less".

Re:But what is TCO anyway?

[einhverfr]

TCO is the lazy person's attempt to measure return on investment. I.e. how much will you have to pay to get x back in better productivity etc.

In my experience Linux-based businesses pay me more as a consultant (at the same hourly rate) than Windows-based businesses. However, this is often because they are getting a *higher* return on investment by being able to have solutions that do exactly what they want. I close reading of the IDC study on the Microsoft site may indicate that others are having similar experiences.

I.e. that you pay a consultant not because you can't make it work adequately in-house, but rather that you would like the product to do X, Y, and Z (which may not be available on Windows) and are willing to pay more for those features because you get a net benefit as a business.

For example, if you cannot adequately impliment a Linux-based file and print server inhouse, you are not going to pay a consultant to tweak the system for you. You will simply go back to Windows (Windows file and print sharing isn't that expensive). If you can, but you realize that it would be cool if (insert idea here) then you might pay a consultant to make that dream a reality.

What I am trying to say is that essentially all of the evidence I am seeing is that those customers who can and do move to Linux are spending more in part because they are investing in an infrastructure that they can use to build their business in very unique ways. As a result, they may be paying a bit more than they would with Windows, but it is not that they are getting a lesser deal. Instead, they are paying more because they are getting a *better* deal.

Lies, Damn lies, and statistics

[Safe Sex Goddess]

Sounds like they made the right decision. The article makes the great point that it's the definitions that make all the difference. It sounds very balanced. It just seems so natural that Open Source is the way to go. As with art and culture, many creative people would have you believe that everything new is created from nothing but their own creative spirit. However, it's possible to trace the historical influences on the evolution of arts and culture. Everything created is based on thousands of years of art and culture that belong to all of humanity. Even new scientific and technological developments are based on the entire history of human scientific knowledge that provides the foundation for new knowledge to be added to. And isn't that what Open Source is all about?

This will never be resolved

[Crixus]

A topic like this will never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The simple fact of the matter is that many huge corporations are using linux corporate wide, and many users on this blog use linux daily with an incredibly low TCO, and a huge satisfaction factor. :-)

That's all that matters.

Re:Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

These studies are targetting corporate I.T. decision-makers, not home users like yourself. An I.T. department is likely to have the luxury of planning for the hardware that will be deployed in the future, and can thus make hardware incompatibilities a minimal concern.

Your claim of 800 hours is also completely off base from a corporate perspective. By setting a few GUI preferences, you could make it look and feel close enough to Windows that the majority of the Win32 workforce wouldn't care. The real work is done by the I.T. department, which probably already has significant in-house Linux muscle.

I won't even get into the benefits of improved manageability/lower licensing...

Security

[WindBourne]

just once, it would be good to see a single MS TCO study include the costs of virus, worms, etc.

I have a stupid question...

[SeventyBang]

Microsoft's efforts in these studies is obviously part of their marketing efforts. Microsoft's strongest suit is marketing, not technology development. After all, look at how many companies they've purchased vs. original technologies which have been developed in-house.

I will qualify my question with this: I like Linux, but I make my bread & butter off of Windows - like it or not, it's easier to find income [here] with Windows. n.b. I said easier. I didn't say the work was better.

Now:
If Windows is such a great product, why is Microsoft plucking out their own short hairs (one-by-one) in frustration because they cannot convince tens of thousands (hundreds of?) of corporate licenses to move from Windows 2000 when it went out of service on June 30 '05; well-covered by the media, no less? It would seem businesses|corporations are well aware the various flavors of 2K are (relatively speaking) arguably the most stable of Microsoft's O/S products. Office 2000 and Visual Studio 6.0 dovetail quite well with 2K, creating a very cozy ménage à trois.

The TCO certain is dropping over time. No need to upgrade software, no need to purchase an assload of new hardware to support upgraded software. Microsoft may have to break one of their "rules" re: backward compatibility. It's been said IE 7.0 won't work on pre-XP systems, although I don't think that's going to make corporate accounts give a rat's posterior because there are some fine, decaf browsers which work quite well and don't make anyone miss IE at all.

As I said, MS could easily prove TCO of Windows is low(er), but to do so would admit loudly businesses don't want to budge. So the question remains: how do they motivate the 2K users to pry open their accounts payable budget and upgrade? Until they answer that, it doesn't matter what they say about TCO.

Re:I'm still weary.

[Hiro Antagonist]

As a skilled Unix admin (according to your definition; I still consider myself to be a neophite, as there are always new things to learn), I rather resent your comparison, as 'Unix admin' and 'Windows admin' are not equal.

I've dug through kernel code and stack traces of buggy applications, conferred with developers, worked with Sun engineers to fix failing hardware, and generally dug very deep into the OS to find and fix problems. Only, I do this before the problems become problems, so that my userbase never sees my efforts.

It's kind of sad, really. They only know I exist when things go wrong, which is pretty rare.

Moreover, I am capable of, and have done, management of hundreds of servers at once. This is without any fancy clustering, expensive support contracts, or any other assistance. Just me, all by my lonesome. Sometimes things got hairy, of course, but overall, the systems I administrated just kept running, even through patches and upgrades galore.

Any problems that cropped up, other than hardware failures, I could fix remotely, saving me an hour-long trip into the office. What was great was when there was another admin, we had time for all sorts of things. The backup system got improved, a whole new security model got put in-place, vacations were took, a new monitoring system got installed...it was great.

One admin. Two hundred servers. That's five milliadmins per server, for the mathematically impared. With no clustering or vendor support, other than for failing hardware, and in a dirt-cheap bare-bones budget environment. Can a Windows admin, even an experienced one, make that claim? I think not.

TCO is important

[typical]

The problem is that for a long time, somewhere, it was hammered into people's heads that "TCO is important". That's a pretty simple, important concept. The idea is that the vendor can hide costs, and that the customer's up-front cost may be less than what they will actually wind up paying.

However, the entire concept of having a bloody vendor doing a TCO study and presenting you with the results is absurd -- it's the vendor presenting you with *another* set of up-front costs. Who is to say that they don't have *more* hidden costs? Unless they are providing you with a guarantee that you will not have to pay a single cent above the TCO that they are claiming, that they will pay every cent in your related costs above claimed TCO, a vendor-supplied TCO is simply meaningless.

The concept of TCO is important. The idea of slapping an absolute value for TCO on product packaging is quite silly.

I think that there's one pretty simple argument in favor of Linux. Any time a vendor provides any possibility of lock-in, be it user familiarity with their software, format incompatibility with thier software, whatever, there is a cost to migrate. At some point, if they are doing a good job of running their business, they will wind up extracting from you $COST_OF_MIGRATION - 1. That's an ideal case, but that's the way it is. Look at software packages from people like IBM, Novell, and so forth. They *will* get more expensive, have expensive things to interface their software and so forth, and the further on in the lifecycle the software is (the more entrenched their remaining customers are and the harder it is to move away from the product) the more expensive the prices. IBM makes a tremendous amount of money from simply providing compatibility with their old systems -- IBM's systems are *not* cheap. Look at SCO if you want to see an even more towards-the-end-of-the-life example.

Now, Microsoft has a great deal of lock-in potential. They provide the primary application suite, have a number of closed formats and protocols, the operating system, and the server-side apps to interface with the application suite. Now, if you go with Microsoft, you are gambling that either (a) someone will come along and reduce cost of migration to a nominal amount (not that likely, especially when it is in Microsoft's interests not to allow this), or (b) that Microsoft will screw up extracting money from their locked-in customers at some point in the future (which seems unlikely, because Microsoft has done a pretty decent and aggressive job of being a business thus far).

Now, I expect Red Hat to do the same damn thing at Microsoft at some point in the future, someday. The point is that it's not very hard to transition from Red Hat to something else if necessary, be it as simple as to White Box Linux or even more extreme (SuSE, Debian, etc). At least in the current state of things, it is extremely difficult for a Linux vendor to achieve any significant degree of lock-in. Start worrying if a vendor starts shipping non-open-source GUI apps (build user familiarity with them, making it harder to switch away), servers (closed protocols, leveraging incompatibility), or so forth. Aside from TrollTech, though, I've seen few attempts to "get a lock" on the Linux distro world, and it looks like there will be a multi-vendor environment for a long time to come. Seems like a pretty attractive option.