TCO and the PC upgrade problem

By Kevin Tolly, Network World, 06/12/06

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As Linux has started nipping at the heels of Windows in recent years, Microsoft has admirably launched an ongoing effort to quantify the total cost of ownership of its offerings vs. alternatives that are mostly on the server front and mostly the aforementioned Linux rather than, say, Apple OS X or Sun Solaris.

The conclusion in these and similar studies is that the capital costs pale in comparison with the time costs of people trying to use the system. In other words, the cost of the software licensing for the operating system and the associated applications that need to be layered on to the base operating system is less than the cost of employees' time consumed in managing or working with the system.

It is difficult to argue with this approach, as human involvement is an essential element of almost any IT endeavor. Depending on the circumstances, though, one can always take issue with the per-hour costs used or the raw amount of time that is claimed to be expended to perform a given task. Ultimately, analyzing costs using this method is what leads Microsoft to conclude that a free system (such as Linux) costs more than the Microsoft alternative.

While the corporate world still remains married to Windows at the desktop, Linux vendors are making efforts to start cracking this market. The vendors have acknowledged that working with Linux distributions generally require more "under the hood" type of knowledge than most corporate users care to deal with and are working to evolve the "hobbyist" look and feel to a more corporate one.

And, of course, there is Apple. While still insignificant in numbers - and hobbled with Entourage, an inferior version of Outlook - the Macintosh works for some corporate users like me. The Mac raises issues of awareness concerning TCO implications of desktop upgrades that neither Microsoft nor its Linux competitors have addressed.

Over the years, I have migrated from one Windows-based machine to a newer one probably a dozen times. Every time I have approached it with equal measures of excitement and angst, as the new machine was always counterbalanced by the effort that I knew I would have to put into making it behave like my current one.

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