A new research report sponsored by, ahem, Microsoft says Windows and Linux offer the same total cost of ownership in emerging markets. The VAR Guy wonders: Are emerging markets somehow getting a break from Microsoft pricing and security software costs that the rest of us don’t receive?
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Being in the middle of emerging events is not a good place to be if you want to spot the point of no return. Microsoft is still winning a lot of battles and their supporters point them out with glee but the island on which they are fighting is getting smaller. I suspect future historians will point to an event that has already happened in our time frame as the straw that broke Microsoft’s mighty back.
Wordperfect Office sells for under $100. Open Office is free.
Microsoft Office is a couple hundred, at least, and the Developer Edition with Software Assurance it about $1,000 per seat. So why isn’t small business downloading Open Office or puchasing Wordperfect office? Maybe their integrator or VAR is advising them that they don’t know either product and would have difficulty supporting it in the customer’s environment. Maybe their integrator has rightly or wrongly advised the enduser that they will have too many incompatibility issues. You know it is really hard for an integrator to take time out of their busy day to learn the free stuff and why would they? They don’t make any money selling these solutions.
For example, let’s say I have a customer that is a law firm. When the lawyers, running the firm, drop what they are doing (making hundreds of dollars in billing) and geek out on OpenSource so they understand it well and implement it throughout the organization. They did two great things: First, they saved tons of money on software costs. Second, now that they are open source geeks they no longer have to pay an integrator those outrage billing rates for support.
Total victory right? Wrong. While the the lawyers were geeking out on OpenSource they neglected to bill their outrage rates to their customers (because they didn’t have the time as they were geeking out on opensource). So they lost lots of billing. Meanwhile the integrator stopped concentrating on this specific customer, because there was no money in it and went on to concentrating more on their other non-opensource customers. So in reality I just don’t see how open source is going to take over at least in the SMB environment, because in reality open source can’t sell itself. It is the integrator that decides what the customer buys, because they have to support it. And unfortunately we don’t do anything for free.
The lawyers lost money one day and saved money forever and all lived happily ever after. Forever time even a small savings is worthwhile.
In my experience, I can migrate an organization from XP/2003 to GNU/Linux on thin clients and save half the cost of migrating to Vista. Then, for ten years, assuming the thin clients still behave like little blocks of silicon that long, all they need is apt-get update;apt-get upgrade or dist-upgrade and they never have to pay the M$ tax again. The savings in Vista licences will likely pay for the professional improvement day. If they are really dedicated the changeover can be done on the weekend, too.
Unfamiliarity with GNU/Linux is not a deal-breaker. Extremadura switched their people over on the weekend, years ago.
see http://www.osnews.com/story/12611
Migration is not news any longer.