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People have been asking us how much Windows 7 costs and how much we would save them to switch an office of 10 peopleover to linux. We will only look at the OS cost and the cost of a Office productivity suite. We wont figure in the extra money needed for antivirus software because linux has no virus's, for windows it is an ABSOLUTE must though

First lets work up the numbers for Windows, we will assume your going to upgrade every pc to Windows 7 and we will even make the assumption your hardware will run Windows 7 (honestly this is totally fool hardy trust me, ALOT of hardware and software is not supported by Windows 7)So this is really a kind of "once upon a time" type of scenario, mind you linux will save you serious money in every scenario you can dream up. We will assume one thing in both scenarios to be the same, the consultants time will be $150 dollars a hour and they both take the same amount of time so we will ignore this factor. In reality windows takes more time to setup. Ok, now shopping around on www.mysimon.com we are able to find Windows 7 Professional from Toshiba for 95 cents cheaper than anyone else online.

That comes to $199.00 per system so your looking at $1990.00 for just the OS software. For linux by going to
www.lsl.com we can buy Ubuntu on cd for a whole whopping $3.79 and you dont need ten copies either.

OK, so just to keep everything an apples to apples comparison here Windows 7 is going to cost you $1990.00 plus shipping and handling
Linux is $3.79 plus shipping and handling. We are ignoring the fact you can download it for free, in a vain attempt to be as fair as possible. You can also download Windows 7 for free on warez sites but its illegal so for this reason we are buying our software whereever we can find it the cheapest!

Now things are already pretty lopsided as you can see, so, just so nobody says we are being unfair lets assume you already have licensed Microsoft office for all of your windows machines.
In linux we could just download OpenOffice and install that for our Office suite, and we could be done with it, but our budget would be under 10 dollars and we did plan on spending something on software so we have two things we can do.

We assumed we had licensed software versions of Microsoft office (either 95, 97, or 2000)and for $54.95 per computer we can run Crossover Office and then install our licensed versions of Office.

So our total now looks like this $1990.00 to get Windows 7 on 10 systems
versus $3.79 plus $549.50 to get Ubuntu and ten licensed copies of Crossover Office and our already owned copies of Office.

As i hope you can see we are trying to be really fair here, but now lets be real for a bit, we want to really upgrade everything after all that is what we are talking about here right?
so lets buy Office 10, Bills been telling me how great it it for a while now.
From mysimon we found the upgrade for Office XP professional for $269.95 that times 10 brings us to $2699.50 plus shipping and handling plus the $1990.00 for
the OS. That brings us to $4,689.50 plus shipping and handling to get 10 PC's upgraded to Windows 7.
To build ten Linux based systems we are looking at one CD from www.lsl.com for $3.79 and since we are not building a Microsoft Solution here
we will go for Libre Office which is free plus shipping and handling so this brings us to a grand total of $3.79

So to wrap things up, upgrading to windows 7 will cost the office of ten users $4,689.50 while upgrading to Linux and Libre Office will save them over $4685 versus moving to Windows 7.

It should be pointed out we didnt take into account the consultants time, so let me say now, you would save there too, it takes less time to
build a complete linux based solution and administration can be performed remotely again saving you even more.

We also didn't talk about what Linux could do for you or save you on the server side, but i think you can already see where ever you decide to look linux is not only the best choice, but it can save you ALOT of cash. We did a few things that makes this totally unrealistic, but we did it to not slight things to much in favor of linux.

We didn't count how much antivirus software costs cause it isn't needed for Linux, we did this to keep it a apples to apples comparison. Which is pretty impossible to do, the fact of the matter is Linux will be easier to deploy whether we are talking 10 desktops or 10,000

we can clone bootable Harddrives for linux we cant do this as easily for windows, we can remotely manage Linux, we cant do this as easily on windows.

The bottom line is this: With windows you can only do what they have let you do and even then every little bit costs you..
With linux you can do ANYTHING you want and its not only cheap, usually its free!

Linux is evolving at an incredible pace. Everyone is converting, Ford, alot of the european banking community, IBM, Ameritrade, Amazon.com, most of Latin America, when you get down to it, this is what google has been built on. Who is running linux, its a large list actually the list just keeps goes on and on.
Once they do they never go back either.
Yes having access to the source code may mean nothing to you, but ask yourself this.
How many of you work on your own car? Probably very few, we take it to a mechanic and we have lots of them to chose from.
So you cant work on it yourself, your not stuck taking it back to the dealer if you chose not to.
Software is the same, its like your car.
With linux everything is right there waiting to be tweaked, just like a car.
If you prefer to buy cars with the hood welded shut, talk to Bill G. and Microsoft.

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