I use Windows at work, OS X at home and no longer have a Linux box. To be honest, I couldn't care less. I organize/customize every machines I own to do exactly what it needs to be doing. If it's a different OS, so be it, hardly changes anything.
If you're even slightly computer savvy, this shouldn't be a problem.
Then why all this hate? All that trash to soft through with people who are shocked about MS (or ANY big company for that matter) lying? Are you SERIOUS? EVERYBODY lies. Discounts happen ALL the time. And as with all statisticsn, it's how you ask the question and how you state your answer. The actual figures don't matter as much.
Many if not all companies selling their products (be it an Office, a PC, an ERP system, a middleware, a broswer) will lie (it's called "(pre)sales") and give sick discounts. You'll be hard pressed to find a company supplying ERP software that doesn't give 50% discount both on initial price and licensing fees for large accounts, or new/risky products ...
That aside ... about that study
- Licenses? Payed? How much discount? Coves all?
- User frustration? You realize a large chunk of the user base (the largest chunk in my opinion) will rage against the new system. Why? Because it's a new system, it's always difficult as IT to sell sth new to the business. EVEN if it's better. You have to take this into account, it can seriously drive up costs (even in sth as simple as XP -> 7 migration)
- Hardware?
- New software/scripts/network settings because of different protocols or whatever used
- 20% overhead for managing such a large project by default
- etc.
Let's at least analyze before shooting it down. That figure must be coming from SOMEWHERE, some analyst was probably wrong, but the data is there and hopfully/probably correct. The calculations he did with it of course are sth else completely. I've seen stated licenses were not included, and that's a huge cost but other than that we don't know a lot ...