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What a Vista Upgrade Will Really Cost You
narramissic writes, "James Gaskin wrote an interesting article this week about what he recons it will really cost organizations to upgrade to Vista. Gaskin estimates that each Vista user will 'cost your company between $3,250 and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. Money will go to Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007, to hardware vendors for new PCs and components, and possibly a few bucks to Apple for those users jumping to a Mac.'" Any sense of how realistic those figures are?
But if you'ree using Office 2000, you don't need Vista. The OS on its own is useless for a business. In fact, so is the PC. People are spending that much just to run office.
Sounds to me as realistic as the numbers in this story.
OK, some details.
Um, no, they won't. A new computer *without* corporate discounts is 25%-30% of that.
Methinks this person knows not what he speaks of. My "corporate" computer is more powerful than my (admittedly older) gaming PC.
Is this guy serious? The "primary" upgrade inducment is looks? I bet he doesn't have a girlfriend...
Vista, for better or worse, has quite a bit more to offer than just "looks".
So, i should believe this guy more than MS. Granted MS has a stake in saying it needs less, but this guy seems to have it in for MS just the same.
Even if that was true, why does that affect corporate PCs, which are usually higher quality.
Actually, if we're talking corporate, upgrades are rarely done for a variety of reasons.
I assumed this meant "existing". Exiting is a different word, having nearly the opposite meaning.
And sarcasm? *This* is an article?
The rest of the "article" is worse FUD than MS puts out.
Have you read my journal today?
The cost needs to be broken down into:
1) Hardware upgrades that would have happened anyways. Apply the "Microsoft Tax" and cost of supporting Vista -or- the manpower cost to install XP to the vista-upgrade cost, leave the rest segregated.
2) Application Software upgradest that would have happened anyways, or that would have happened but for the fact the new software requires Vista
3) The cost of upgrading vista, including supporting Vista, training end-users, license fees, Microsoft Tax on new computers if tax is above license fee for the version of XP you were using, and for companies NOT upgrading, the manpower involved to "downgrade" from Vista to XP.
Yes, that's right, "upgrading" to Microsoft will cost you manpower for every new MS-license-equipped PC even if you stick with XP. Happy Happy Joy Joy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
good point, but I'd say that current word processing, email, web browsing and spreadsheeting technologies are at a point where tossing more hardware at them makes no discernable difference after about a gig of ram and a one gigaherz processor. Number crunching, Image and movie manipulation is an other matter. Most offices don't do those things.
from 2000. Then again, it was totally worth it. We basically did the same as we did moving people to Mac OS X - hunt down groups of users and spend a lot of time migrating. But the increase in stability and capability it added really made up for a lot of this.
Now, this isn't to say I agree with the figures. I haven't seen them, yet. With 2000->XP and OS9->OSX, there typically weren't hardware upgrades required. It was mostly technician time. But there was a cost, and it's not inconsequential.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
So the requried hardware for Vista didn't really cost me anything extra because it was I was going to buy it anyway as part of my system upgrade cycle (I have a system upgrade cycle?!?), and Vista didn't cost me anything because it came "free" with the hardware.
Well that's a relief. I thought that money I was going to spend was real. I can't wait to tell the CFO the money I'm telling he's spending doesn't really cost him anything.
And I guess the good news is that I'm no longer paying this same nothing twice, too.