Microsoft study overlooks Windows biggest cost
(Credit:
Roy Schestowitz)
Microsoft has been a little quiet on the "independent TCO (total cost of ownership) study" front for at least a week now, so it is perhaps not surprising to see the company promoting a new TCO study comparing the cost of deploying Linux and Windows in emerging markets. Vital Wave Consulting, that paragon of research (no, I've never heard of it, either), published the study.
But who wrote it is somewhat immaterial here. The problem is that the research fails to acknowledge the biggest cost of working with Microsoft: the cost of exit.
First, to the research. As Microsoft's James Utzschneider, general manager of Marketing and Communications for Unlimited Potential (Microsoft's euphemism for emerging markets), suggests, the study reveals that Windows is more expensive to acquire but that the cost of Linux-savvy administrators offsets that expense, making it a financial wash over five years.
This may very well be true, but it misses the point, as noted. If the cost is the same, buy Linux. Linux doesn't come with a monopoly attached to it. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, as this one provided by Roy Schestowitz does.
Microsoft, of course, has only dropped its prices to play catch-up with open-source pricing and to stave off piracy, piracy which company co-founder Bill Gates admits helps Microsoft as much as it hurts it in such markets.
About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
That Gates quote was taken from a 1998 article in Fortune, and should be enough to clearly describe why inbound acquisition cost is the wrong way to measure a financial decision to purchase Windows over Linux. Indentured servitude is not what most IT departments are looking for in an operating system.
In short, I believe Microsoft's sponsored TCO study may have many flaws, but only one that really matters: it overlooks the cost of buying a one-way ticket into Microsoft's walled garden. The cost of entry may in fact be quiet low. But what's the price of exit? Open source makes the cost of exit as close to free as the cost of entry is. It's a software development methodology and a CIO risk mitigation strategy, all rolled into one.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Windows and Windows Applications can be run on HP, Dell, Toshiba,... custom built, and self-built computers.
With Mac OSX and Mac Applications, your only computer hardware choices are Apple, Apple, and Apple. That's one reason that most businesses avoid Macs like the plague.
You have the most open and configurable machine in the world.
Get a Mac already.
They assume that over a *FIVE* year period, you won't change, upgrade or update your PCs and software.
It also fails to take into consideration the subscription license lock-ins that M$ are so fond of here in the UK. The deal that ensures every school pays a license fee to M$ for *EVERY* computer (be it Apple, Atari, or anything faster than an Intel 286) the school possesses.
They assume that there will be no "new" applications installed in that 5 year period. You will stick with Vista and MS Office 2007 and that's it.
And they don't include the:
* recurring costs for fixing and maintaining Windows software due to virus attacks;
* after running for a year or so after which time you need to re-install the whole shebang because the registry gets so full of crap the system slows to a crawl;
* extra hardware that a Windows Vista computer needs to 'just work', compared to a lean machine that can run Ubuntu or many other distros.
One other very interesting point was they only mentioned Red Hat by name as a Linux vendor. What about their *big pal* Novell? Surely it would have been in their interests to at least mention them?
lol
Linux systems have low cost administrators, but they aren't the ones that will be doing the day to day grind of help desk / system support. That's a very real cost that the study didn't address. You can find support for Mac/Windows fairly easily, but with Linux the thing is so fragmented that you really have to spend more time figuring out what flavor of the OS you have and what support options are available that your overall downtime can be much more impacting to business. If you go with a solution like Red Hat, that can be minimized somewhat, but even then, you're really stuck with one company. If I need Windows or Mac help, I can go to a lot of other companies that provide services including HP, Siemens, IBM, and others. I'm not stuck with Apple or MS. With Linux... yeah.
All have their place. For servers, Linux is a good choice and support costs are low. For desktop / terminal use, then the costs go up very very fast.
(As a side note, this blog post seems to be intended only to spark webhits by trolling with Mac/Windows/Linux debate and has very little actual value beyond that)
As for his premise, it's really nonsense. ANY OS switch is going to be hard. Why does it matter if you bought Windows or Red Hat or Mac OS, or a free alternative?
As for this continued talk of a monopoly: bull! A monopoly is only a monopoly if it prevents choice. People have choices on what to buy. That's why Mac is doing so well. Matt just hates the fact that most businesses still happen to prefer Microsoft. Even over much better products like his own Alfresco. Sorry, Matt, you can't continue to bash another company just because they happen to charge money for their software, and actually have the audacity not to share 100% of their intellectual property.
John
RedHat, Novell and Mandriva are extremely similar as they all use the same package system - RPM. Ubuntu and Debian use DEB packages. They all try to adhere to the Linux Standards Base, so that system management files are consistently named and placed in the Linux file tree.
I have 13 different flavours on my help desk laptop and have no trouble showing people how to solve their problems or even select the distro that is right for their needs. The differences are really just about the installed choice of window manager and the focus of the applications, although nearly every distro can use the window manager and applications of the others.
The ones that don't are for vertical market systems like real time media streaming, sound mixing, scientific, business and financial analysis, real time video fashion product mirrors or point of sale front ends.
I also teach Linux administration and use, For the average Australian worker, after 3 months worth of weekly tuition, they know enough to be able to help and even teach others. Sure they can pay Red Hat or Novell for initial support, but once the workers have learned the basics, they find Linux is really easy to administer compared with Windows or MAC, so costs go down, not up as in your experience.
Just get yourself a user oriented Linux teacher and your business will benefit.
Really? Apple computers run just about every OS under the sun. Windows, Linux, OS X....
The big argument here is that enterprises, and their average CIOs and tech folks, are often unwilling to look beyond their certifications and zones of comfortability; an example of top-down management that is probably going to have to wait another generation to go the way of the MBA.
Uh no! In fact, Macs are the only OS-unlimited computers. YOu can run any software on them and any operating system. Macs will run any software on the planet. How is that limited and a 'walled garden'?????
"With Mac OSX and Mac Applications, your only computer hardware choices are Apple, Apple, and Apple. That's one reason that most businesses avoid Macs like the plague."
You may be able to run windows, linux, etc... on a Mac, but it doesn't exactly work the other way around, which I think is what he meant. Although there are ways to get around this now, but its not easy...
Now with the addition of Unix support on Mac in OS X there are a lot of freeware and open source programs going that route that are making it even more lucrative and lets not even mention the virus issue - Windows OS is by far the most virus "friendly" platform on the market.
And even Gartner's TCO costs are totally inflated. Only the worst highly unionized featherbedding environment can get up to their ridiculous costs. A Dell with Office on it costs $800. Keep it 5 years. TCO is $160 per year. period. After 5 years do that again. No brain surgery required.
Sorry, apple is nowhere near ready to provide anything close to the manageable domain environment that companies want. Linux is the only OS that will compete with microsoft in the corporate world.
Think, kids: Windows 98 to Win2k. Windows 2k/XP to Vista. Tons of compatibility problems with in-house apps... the litany goes on and on, folks.
That is the part of TCO the author should be talking about.
That's like saying, "The hidden costs of a Tattoo are in the removal procedure."
A better metaphor is that the cost of using heroin is not just reflected in the purchasing price of your first fix. The true cost of using heroin must include the cost of your subsequent unwanted fixes which are necessary because your first fix causes addiction, and the cost of detoxification required to return to the state of free choice which you had before you took your first fix.
Well if that were a silly question then there would have been no need for this study. But apparently organizations are exiting. Lets not play like you can't run into problems with Windows and decide to move to a different platform. I'm helping work my employer off of Windows and onto Linux right now. Cost and reliability play a large part in this switch.
- by 3147 September 26, 2008 12:34 PM PDT
- Actually there are a number of costs not included in using Microsoft software. The problem is not so much the software as the proprietary deliberately incompatible file formats used to achieve lock-in and forced upgrade.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(23 Comments)1) Cost of virus and malware protection and cleanup.
2) Cost of data lock-in - you are forced to buy from a high cost monopoly supplier due to the fact that data has planned incompatibility. This means you can't shop around for cost or productivity savings. Data lock-in also may be very costly in terms of productivity if Microsoft chooses not to market a product that allows access to your data stored in a proprietary Microsoft format. MS Write users have already encountered this problem of inaccessibility, and some early Microsoft Office formats don't convert with full fidelity on currently available Microsoft software. Considering that contracts may be valid for 12 to 50 years, this is an important issue.
3) Cost of forced upgrade through planned format incompatibility. Most users are forced to upgrade MS software every 3 three to four years and before they really want to by the forced , and it isn't just the software cost, it is also the retraining cost or drop in efficiency in coping with unnecessary new features and interfaces, cost of buying new hardware either to get OEM licenses or to get a system powerful enough to handle feature bloat of the new application. The majority of users want to carry on using their software and computers until they and not Microsoft decides that they should change to a new model. Unfortunately with Microsoft coming up with a new incompatible file format every 3 to 4 years, that is not possible if you wish to be interoperable with others, and of course the default save format is set to the new incompatible version so you force the upgrade on others you communicate with.