| How much does upgrading to Linux cost versus upgrading to Windows XP |
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People have been asking us how much XP 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 XP and we will even make the assumption your hardware will run XP (honestly this is totally fool hardy trust me, ALOT of hardware and software is not supported by XP)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 $100 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 XP 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 OK, so just to keep everything an apples to apples comparison here XP is going to cost you $1990.00 plus shipping and handling 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. 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 XP on 10 systems 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 to wrap things up, upgrading to XP will cost the office of ten users $4,689.50 while upgrading to Linux and Hancom Office will save them over $4000 versus moving to XP. 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 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.. 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, the list goes on and on. |