[ILUG] Linux is more expensive than Windows

[John McCormac]

Bryan O'Donoghue wrote:
 > Made up, corporate floosie statistics? For shame, technical
 > journalists don't go in for that kind of sensationalism.

Clark is not a technical journalist. He just another case of that
dot.bomb detritus - the 'technology journalist'. So please do not do him
the honour of referring to him as a technical journalist.

 > Where do these people get their information from a) directly from
 > M$'s marketing department or b) from some wrapper found on the ground
 >  they had been licking for taste?

A press release? This is generally the place that ENN gets its 'news'
from, (at least the stuff it does not syndicate from El Reg or
Silicon.com). This article is more a clever twist on a common advert
that has been running on websites over the last few months. It has
served its purpose, which is not to enlighten as good journalism does,
but to drive users to the ENN website.

The big 'consultancies' tend to produce whatever the people paying for
the report want to hear. In this case, I would not be surprised to see
Microsoft's involvement there somewhere.

The initial set of data in the survey is probably dubious in that it
seems to be preselected to return a specific result. How many of
those interviewed were actually using a completely Windows based
solution? How many C-level executives actually have a clue about their
organisations IT infrastruture? Now factor in the costs of switching, 
and yes, Linux probably does work out more expensive than their current 
situation.

Then there is the cost of implementing a similar end-user software
package. Does this all fall under the TCO banner? There is a nice
revealing sub quote in the press release quote that Clark used: "90
percent of 300 large enterprises with 10,000 or more end-users indicated
that a significant or total switch from Windows to Linux would be too
expensive". The deliniation between server orientated operations and
desktop operations seems to purposely obscured. And yet elsewhere in the
recycled press release, the obligatory Windows share of the desktop
market is mentioned.

It is difficult to say but in the right hands, or rather when being paid
to produce a specific result, a report from any of these 'consultancies'
is at best dubious and at worst wrong. It is more fodder for every two
bit press release regurgitator. The sample is only 1000 and the world is
a pretty big place. Without seeing how many Unix or Linux operations
were included in this survey, it is just another press release.

Perhaps the postponement of Longhorn is (I think) the real reason for
such guff appearing. There probably will be a lot more of it as release
dates slip into the future.

Sometimes, rubbish like this from ENN makes me consider restarting
Hackwatch as a continually updated news site.

Regards...jmcc
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