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Old 03-02-2006, 10:44 PM   #11
mbpark
Lecturer
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Carmel, Indiana
Posts: 761
It's only half-bad if it's enterprise

I do know one thing:

Large Enterprises (and anything ending in .gov or .mil) pay a certain amount per seat for Windows and Office Professional on the desktop, Active Directory, and as many Windows Server licenses as you can possibly want. This price is negotiable, and actually mentioning that you're looking at Linux to cut costs will cause your MS rep to discount .

However, the big ticket items, such as Project, Visio, Exchange Server Enterprise Edition (because you can't support a large business on Standard Edition), SQL Server Enterprise Edition, Windows Server Enterprise Edition, SharePoint Portal Server, and SMS/MOM will run even the largest business a large amount of cash.

Figure in the costs for antivirus and good backup software (think Symantec NetBackup, CommVault, or EMC/Legato), and you're looking at a really serious chunk of change.

In my job, I have to cost out servers for customers. Hardware is the least costly part of the equation for me, especially for database servers. Even at .EDU level pricing, Oracle still runs $60K for a quad-processor server, and SQL Server comes in at $25K.

Your average vertical-industry app will run in the $25K-$50K range too, to start.

When you also add in support costs, Linux and Windows do run neck and neck. When you add in administrative costs, it's not as bad, as Linux requires less administration.

A big part of the problem with Windows Vs. Linux is that traditionally, Windows boxes do less than their UNIX counterparts. Windows is also designed in such a half-assed and broken way with Terminal Services such that you can only have one or two people performing admin work at a time, with no decent Command Line Interface. A good portion of the time, you have to fire up VNC to get things done. Compare this to UNIX, where anyone with an X Server or SSH connection can get in and get work done without kludge hacks or worrying about being on console or not.

UNIX, with the notable exception of anything the SCO Group puts out, is designed to be touched less and to be used by more people. The UNIX boxes are also designed to be used for more than one thing. Your average Windows admin will have a ton of boxes doing one or two small things. Your average UNIX admin will have one box doing a ton of things .

However, most of that software will still require licenses.

The point here: Windows costs a lot of money. Doing things the "right" way with UNIX in a large enterprise also costs a lot of money, even if you run Linux, because you still have to buy SW and support. Windows has a lot of added corollary costs for Antivirus software. Linux and UNIX still have those added costs (CommVault ain't cheap, and neither is Tripwire!). Windows Vista will cost a lot of money to upgrade to because you will have to upgrade the hardware as well.

I have a customer who had to get all new PCs just because of XP (they were a 2000 shop and moved to XP en masse when SP2 came out and was somewhat stable), and dropped over $1M on new PCs due to the fact that older Pentium 4 machines which flew on Windows 2000 Pro couldn't run XP Pro SP2 well. Vista is supposed to have the same level of performance hit that XP had compared to 2000. Ouch.

The vertical apps that people want which run your doctor's office, your hospital, even your government, run on Windows. If and when more of these apps, outside the Point of Sale realm, end up running on Linux/UNIX, then we'll see less of the assraping from MS. However, things will still cost a lot of money. The difference is that you'll spend a lot less on hardware, and won't be on a forced upgrade cycle with HW.

Microsoft does a few things right: Visual Studio (and Visual Foxpro - they can't kill this product no matter how hard they try, and you'd be surprised how many vertical apps are written in it!), Office (esp. Access), SQL Server, Exchange Server, and IIS.

They've made it dead simple to write the critical apps that businesses rely upon, and yes I consider Outlook/Exchange a development platform. When you can put a warm body in a seat and have something half warmed-over doing something you need cheaply under Linux or UNIX the same way you can with a Visual Basic or Foxpro developer, then you'll see Microsoft trying to fuck people over less. Java has a chance of doing this when they (the people that write the tools) learn how to make things less academic . The Mono project may be the starting point for this, as well. OS X is the furthest ahead, and only needs better integration of existing UNIX tools with Apple's UI to make a run at MS, and an emphasis on a dead-simple programming language on the level of VB.

The final point: Do what you can to make things as dead-simple as MS has across the enterprise, and you'll see a less greedy MS.

Mitch
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