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Steve Ballmer on MS Server, Linux, Yahoo & More
yorugua writes "Furniture trembled as Steve Ballmer was to be interviewed by InformationWeek. He then went on to talk about Linux: 'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value, which in this case means good total cost of ownership," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.', Embrace-Extend-Extinguish: 'We say when we embrace standards, we'll be transparent about how we're embracing standards. [...] If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations.'"
And the FUD, don't forget the FUD.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Aparently his version of TCO doesn't include buying completely new machines in order to run Vista. After all, Vista is only 1/2 as slow on the same hardware... I remember the day when your programs took more resources than the operating systems... those were the days.
Maybe I'm daft, but I'm not seeing this statement in this interview, although the original post seems to imply it's there.
Don't get me wrong, I don't LIKE Ballmer, and I'm no MS fan (as I type this from my Ubuntu desktop with Firefox, etc. etc. etc.) I just think they do their own damage, we don't need to add to it.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Single page link without the trailing slash, so that it actually works.
A very illuminating Microsoft Confidential presentation from the antitrust discovery process. If you're in a hurry start with the slides at page 9. This is what he should have been asked about...
Comes-3096.pdf
That number is complete bullshit unless there are some SERIOUSLY major flaws at the company, or they have some pretty obscure needs ( military level security protocols, triple redundancy on everything they do, etc... ) that bloat the support costs.
At the last company I worked, we were @ 750 desktops. Under our EA agreement CALS for XP + Office Pro + Exchange + Messenger + Sharepoint were under 1000$ per user. Actual desktop support was handled by two techs making 50K/year each, so I guess for 750 desktops would be 100,000 / 750, or say 133$ per user on average.
Beyond desktop licensing, the only other costs I can think of are about 20 Win2K3 server licenses ( for various reasons ) at about 1000$ a shot, various 5 SQL server per proc licenses at 5K a piece and then Exchange server... not sure the cost there, but it was minimal as we were on CAL based licensing. So, from a server side of things, that adds another 20,000 + 25,000 == 45,000 in server licensing, meaning 45,000/750 = 60$ per user.
So, we were looking at 1000$ + 133$ + 60$ or 1193$ per user for all servers, desktop software licensing and physical support!. Finally we had ( at our peak ) 4 net techs averaging say 60K annually and 2 dev/sql guys again around 60K per year. So even factoring IT staff into the equation into the formula adds 360,000K to the number, or 480$ per user.
All thats really missing from this equation is connectivity charges, physical server costs, backup, utilities like hydro, etc... which you are going to have to pay regardless to technology you go with... otherwise thats a pretty accurate budget for running a 750 user IT shop using Windows tech.
No where close to 12,000$, not even by a long shot.
Couldn't care less, the phrase is couldn't care less, else it makes no sense.