It turns out that Project is part of the Office Suite but not bundled into any of the pre-set Suites but is installed on 7% of all Office desktops. Microsoft Project has a list price of $1,000 and is the highest profit margin SKU up in Redmond. They do over $1 billion each year in Project sales. In a tough economic environment people will not pay $1,000 per copy of Project when OpenProj is free and Projity’s SaaS solution (Project-ON-Demand) is only $19.99/month. In good times you can make the argument that an open source solution available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows makes sense… in tough times you can make the clear argument for free or low cost SaaS solutions. FYI, Project also requires Project Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint Server and Visio to work properly. The burden cost for companies is far higher than the $1000 list price.

Projity is riding the wave that Marten Mikos noted: they have a strong community that has translated the solution into French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian and Chinese in just the two months they have been released. Microsoft has spent 20 years and have a few thousand employees working on Office Project. Projity has a worldwide team including myself who actively support the solution. We see a clear path to 11+ million worldwide users. This can be garnered in good or bad economic conditions.

Great arguments, I agree !!!!

M$ can not go open source, no way. Way to much in its own structrure is extra profit.

That doesn’t always translate into good business. Like anyone, we have to eat and pay our bills. If nobody pays us then we’re less prone to doing the annoying parts of being a programmer such as writing documentation and offering support. Often businesses will want to use our code but they don’t want to pay anything for it. Sure you can save money upfront by being cheap but in the end it’ll cost more than if you start off as a paying customer.

In a recession the bigger open source companies will do well because they do have a lot of their own programmers and support staff. Smaller companies will find it harder because the community will be less willing to give away their time and expertise doing boring stuff. The bigger companies will still spend less than their closed source rivals but they still have to spend money to keep their business running.

The development of Linux and other open source software continues at full speed whether Red Hat makes money next quarter or not. Many unemployed or under employed tech workers will spend time working on OSS projects - thus a recession will actually give a boost to the pace of improvement in the sector. So, open source development is recession proof. Companies and stock prices are not.

Zimbra integrated many open source components and Yahoo thought it was worth USD 350 million; Citrix bought XenSource, the virtualization co, for US 500 million; Xen users open source. MySQL will make money, Asterisk will make money, and so will Ubuntu, Openbravo, Adempiere, Scalix, and all those who will integrate these wonderful products and technologies in the coming years.

And MySQL is not true open source.

If your company uses open source, and if you are doing work on an open source project for the benefit of your company, how does that make you expendable.

Sure … if your job is a programmer at Microsoft and you spend all your time programming Firefox, then you are expendable.

If, on the other hand, you are working on a project like DimDim or MySQL and it is installed on 150 servers inside your company’s infrastructure … and if their business model uses that to make money you are FAR from expendable.

WHAT … people actually use open source to MAKE MONEY?

Wake up George … this is not 1985

Great points. Pretty lame that The VAR Guy’s thinking didn’t include key issues like exchange rates and global reach. But on the other hand, that’s why The VAR Guy blogs for a living and never had the guts to compete with MSFT on his own.

A full blown recession or (god forbid) depression will be very bad for the open source community. If you have enough time to spend writing code for an open source project, you probably are not giving your company a good value for their money. That means you are expendable.

If becoming open source were a financial advantage, Microsoft would do it. There is no magic to publishing your source code — and in fact Microsoft does publish some of theirs as they feel appropriate for their business. In the end few customers really care — they want their people using the products, not spending time tweaking the operating system.