The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software

Glyn Moody writes "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really 'free,' and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft's products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was 'a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting "consultancy support" to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft.' To make the comparisons fair, isn't it about time these often massive costs were included in TCO calculations?"

Comments

Hear hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

For example: The State of Vermont's Agency of Human Services just went through a similar exercise and I'm sure it cost them a fortune. The state is suffering financially as it is and yet, we haven't heard a WORD (there really isn't any investigative news in VT) about the outcome or how much it is costing

Re:You cannot use viruses/bugs as an example of co

[WilyCoder]

You might have a point.... except that Apache is far more popular than IIS and yet IIS is the one routinely attacked.

Re:You cannot use viruses/bugs as an example of co

[ground.zero.612]

You might have a point.... except that Apache is far more popular than IIS and yet IIS is the one routinely attacked.

Citation needed? ;)

Seriously, some data would be nice.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/requested.html