Gil Freund wrote:[snip]
That's not it.
This study is a MS sponsored study. While IDC did their own research, they were told what parameters to test this under. In particular:
1. Whether or not certain aspects were checked. Security patching, anyone?
2. Time over which this was tested (coming back to 1 - anyone knows a shop that does not upgrade an MS product in 5 years. Why wasn't upgrade costs covered? An MS product is EOL after three years, four at most).
3. Which companies to ask.
I have not read the original, and it is not linked in the globes article, but I think we are basically saying the same. An MS shop can be made to look good in TCO terms, especially in larger organizations which get a much sweeter deal, at the expense of small and medium business.
Taking all of the above into consideration, anyone can be made to look good. I did expect more from Globes, though. Saying that "despite it being sponsored by Microsoft" seems unproffessional to me.
TCO has always amazed me as a meter. Ask any IT manager what the TCO of any product WAS (read - past tense), and then ask yourself what that answer means. This NEVER includes everything, because you cannot include everything. How much time people spent cursing about it's use. How much time the admin spent reading the manual. How many times they were interrupted for unrelated tasks.
And yet, we hear of people asking for TCO calculations about the future. What do they mean?
If what you are saying is that TCO cannot be calculated, I disagree. Take this very easy comparison:
Assume the following
1. A windows workstation will (on an average) have to be rebooted once a week during working hours due to a memory leak or other issues.
2. Assume you need an average of 15 minutes per reboot (figuring out that no other solution will work, doing the reboot, logging in again and getting to your most recent work stated)
3. Assume you have 180 working days a year.
4. Assume 9 hour work day.
this adds up to 1 work day per year per worker lost due to MS issues.
Now, assume the following: You have 100 workers. You pay minimum wages You just lost 26,500 NIS or 4 man months.
The assumptions above are conservative.
You could go deeper and analyze any aspect of IT. You don't need (an actually you can't) do a complete TCO analysis as some information (such as wages) are out of your reach, but you can certainly assess the down times, the labor and the software and hardware costs.
Let finance and HR do the rest.
Gil
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