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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?
Most of the hardware costs would be there anyway as part of a normal IT refresh cycle. So I call BS.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
$2000: New Hardware
$ 900: Vista License
$2100: Solid Gold Mouse
Strange times indeed when the stock market analysts hope a new Microsoft operating system will counteract the declining housing market, but that's the hope of some for next fall. If your company plans to play the Vista game, start cooking your books now.
.com.
I estimate 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. After all, if Apple's higher cost has been the factor keeping your company from trying a Mac, that factor just washed away.
Why $3,250-$5,000? Here's my calculation. Feel free to tell me what your company has budgeted, and whether you believe your own numbers.
New PCs will cost $1,500-$2,000. Darn few existing corporate PCs will have the video horsepower needed to run Aero, Vista's primary upgrade inducement. You need 256MB of video RAM to run Aero properly, no matter what Microsoft's marketing says. I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM. Upgrade? While in the PC, add memory: Vista needs a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The hardware cost of the RAM may be less than your labor costs getting that installed in every PC. If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well.
Depending on your volume purchasing agreements, new copies of Vista and Office will total between $750 and $1,000. After all, your company always buys the "professional" packages, right? And they have to be installed, right? If you're getting a much cheaper quote on both packages installed and tested, let me know.
The real value of Vista and Office 2007 includes new collaboration services. This means new back end servers. Most estimates place the back end support cost at $2,000 per user, but I used a range of $1,000-$2,000 for my calculations. Why get Office 2007 if not new SharePoint and Exchange servers? Can you run both on one box? Didn't think so.
Document your objections now, because next year the vice presidents will blame IT for their busted budget. But the housing market appreciates you taking up the slack. James E. Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986. Write him at mailto: james.gaskin@itworld
body massage!
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.
Honestly, I do have to give Microsoft a bit of marketing credit for using years in their product names. When machines were refreshed around my office last year, a coworker of mine started hemming and hawing about how he needed an update to Office 2000, because it was 5 years old. The thing is, he has absolutely no problem using the other programs that he does that are 5 years old and 2 versions out of date. He doesn't think of it in terms of "I'm using version 5 when version 7 is out there." But he does notice that he's using Office 2000 in the year 2006...
This guy's the limit!
Or more than 640K of memory - that should be enough for anyone :)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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.
Why on earth would companies upgrade all of their systems to Vista if it requires them to upgrade the hardware? Vista in itself has no real advantage over XP for corporate use, so the only machines running Vista in the workplace will be the ones that came with it pre-installed.
Remember how long it took to get rid of NT4/98? Lots of people are still using 2k, and XP has been out longer than other desktop releases. XP is going to be around for a long time.
If the move to Vista is stretched out over a number of years, much of the cost will be absorbed by normal new hardware spending, and I don't see XP becomming rare until the next decade.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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.
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That is until you put Vista on it.
I tried RC1 over the weekend. With a 2 ghz processor and 1 gb RAM, at Idle I was pushing 70% physical RAM usage and a constant 10% load on the processor. I wrestled with Neverwinter Nights till it ran and the graphics lag was unbearable, not unplayable, but when it runs qwuite smoothly on the same system with XP or 2K3 server, there is an issue.
You say you want a revolution....
Aero is not required on corporate PCs so scratch the video upgrade. We deployed Windows XP with the dummied-down Windows 2000 interface and expect to do the same with Vista. We do allow users to change to the Fisher-Price UI if they like, though.
Corporate customers don't pay between $750 and $1k for Office - our enterprise licensing for Microsoft products (which includes the OS, Office Professional and Server and Exchange CALs) runs about $200 per PC per year.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
For all that Microsoft does to make our life harder, they create more jobs for everybody supporting windows. In a strange way, windoze sucking as bad over the years has spawned whole industries that would not be around probably if we had a rock solid OS.
Of course, the average cost of a good developer, total to the company, is around $60-90 per hour. That's $500-750 per day. If having the latest hardware around makes them even slightly more productive, or gives them a reason to work an extra hour per week (not day, week), that pays for a new, kick-ass system every six months or so -- and that's assuming that you just shred the old hardware.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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 just get two or more spares ready for deployment in an emergency! If you need 50 identical desktops, buy enough bits for 55 machines. If one goes down, you bung in a spare while you fix it -- substituting parts from another, known good machine. The original spare stays put and the fixed machine then becomes another spare.
Installing identical software on many machines is easy too. Either use dd to copy an entire drive (BTW, this even works with Windows: boot from a USB device if possible, otherwise a DVD+RW drive [DMA-capable, won't slow down the bus] on hdb and have hard drives on hda and hdc); or set up your own local mirror of your favourite distro, and install over the LAN via http or ftp.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!