Comment Re:how are those figures fudged? (Score 1) 649
It seems that most individual users are concerned about purchase price only, when in reality the marketing depts use Total Cost of Ownership estimates. Unfortunately, how each group defines TCO is where the real spin doctors come in.
The most widely used models for TCO use acquisition cost + support costs over the lifetime of the product. Support costs for Linux are relatively high for purchased support and mid-range for internal support personnel.
Another variable is the base system used. One report used the OS, Directory server, Application server, Volume manager, File system and security firewall components as a base system. For this setup, Windows 2K and 2K+3 came out less than half the cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and HP-UX both. IBM AIX came out a little better than the Windows OSes. Solaris 9 x86 was by far the cheapest (it includes everything listed above in the OS).
Another study I saw focused on the support and implementation aspect much more and it reported that Linux on Intel came out much cheaper than Unix on Risc architecture. Windows was not mentioned.
Bottom line - Depending on how you define the statistics, you can push anything you want. This is where Microsoft really excels (too bad it's not in technology and innovation).
The most widely used models for TCO use acquisition cost + support costs over the lifetime of the product. Support costs for Linux are relatively high for purchased support and mid-range for internal support personnel.
Another variable is the base system used. One report used the OS, Directory server, Application server, Volume manager, File system and security firewall components as a base system. For this setup, Windows 2K and 2K+3 came out less than half the cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and HP-UX both. IBM AIX came out a little better than the Windows OSes. Solaris 9 x86 was by far the cheapest (it includes everything listed above in the OS).
Another study I saw focused on the support and implementation aspect much more and it reported that Linux on Intel came out much cheaper than Unix on Risc architecture. Windows was not mentioned.
Bottom line - Depending on how you define the statistics, you can push anything you want. This is where Microsoft really excels (too bad it's not in technology and innovation).
