Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD?

walterbyrd writes "Linux Journal has published an article by Glyn Moody, about the Microsoft sponsored study: The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista (pdf). Apparently Moody feels that the economic effects of MS-Vista being delayed in Europe would not be as dire as Microsoft would have the world believe." From the article: "The implication is that the European Commission would be crazy to jeopardize these wonderful benefits by clipping the wings of this digital golden goose, or even grounding it completely. The white paper looks tremendously professional, and is filled with tables, bar and pie charts; it has suitably serious discussions of methodology, and even introduces a few measured caveats: who could doubt its conclusions? What makes this FUD so impressive is that this attention to detail obscures the sleight of hand that is going on here. The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."

Comments

Hardware and open source quotes

[Lord Satri]

FTA: "As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware." Sounding obvious, I don't see the need of new hardware as innovation. On the contrary. If you need to buy new hardware, it's a cost to the consumer and a cost to the environment. Vista (or any other OS) having higher hardware requirements is 'bad' news. The broken window fallacy was linked in a previous /. article. Would be interesting to take Vista impact and view it from a GPI point of view.

Just wanted to quote "As far as I can tell, the phrases "free software" and "open source" are not mentioned once in the white paper." I don't think I have anything useful to add. Commercial software is not a bad thing in itself, but you must evaluate the TCO and ROI when comparing software (including OS).

Re:Wow!

[arkhan_jg]

Obviously money has to change hands somewhere, but its the details that are important.

For starters, money spent on licenses doesn't stay in the EU; it goes back to the US. If it stayed locally, as it often does with smaller EU software shops, then it gets spent on salaries, growing the business etc and gets invested back into the local economy. Money going back to Microsoft US is basically money down the drain from the point of view of Europe.

Similarly, replacing currently working computers with more powerful ones, purely to run vista - and with all the extra power being sucked up with the pretty effects - is the broken windows fallacy; i.e. money spent on new computers purely to run vista, with no other advantage is money that could have been spent on other areas instead. Also, most of the PC makers are not european, so the bulk of the money again goes out to the benefit of US and asian businesses, to the cost of europeans.

Finally, retraining and hiring lots of people to manage, maintain and use windows vista and office 12 (or whatever version it'll be) is only a benefit if they end up more productive at the end of it; if they are about as productive as they were on the old software, then the training costs are wasted money caused by being stuck on the windows treadmill. That money will go back into the local economy at least, but it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things, rather than just maintain the more complex infrastructure that nobody understands properly.

As the article says, european companies could quite happily spend the 40 billion on other things to grow their business, instead of spending it purely to stand still and get back to where they were but with slightly prettier graphics - something not particularly useful to business workers. If vista brings massive productivity benefits to people upgrading, fair enough - but that's not the reason they're talking about $40b, that's the money european businesses will need to spend (largely overseas) to get through it in one piece. Not a hugely compelling reason to upgrade, in my view.