NewsForge Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions

[Brian Densmore]

How do you figure? I figure 100 users running Windows and Office and Outlook
would be about $35,000. You should be able to "rent" an implementer for less
than that. Although, I'll agree on the PCs, I just bought the parts for a
new Duron PC for $150, and I could get preconfigured ones for about $500.
Although the article does appear a bit flawed in numbers. Those numbers
probably came from a Linux sales rep. 
Oh, pffht! 
What was I thinking, these are -=Floridians=- we're talking about. They
can't ever get the numbers right!

Brian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins at opus1.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2001 2:00 PM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: NewsForge Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions
> 
> 
> I was hoping this would be useful to argue for a switch to 
> Linux here, as
> well as among some friends.  Unfortunately, there is so much 
> misinformation
> about MS/Windows stuff that I can't use it.  Sure, it 
> presents the case that
> you can run an office using *NIX instead of Windows, but 
> their claims about
> savings and reliability are way off.
> 
> I'm sure there are places where crashes that loose work are 
> still common,
> but they're not run by someone competent enough to develop a 
> *NIX office
> system.  For the claimed price of $750 you can get a PC that 
> will run NT.
> 
> I did some quick math on license fees, and figuring server, 
> workstation,
> office suite, and mail client, multiplied by the nominal 100 users I
> support, the license cost wouldn't pay a year's salary for someone to
> develop and deploy the configuration for the end-users, and I 
> really don't
> think I could do both that and maintain my current level of support.
> 
> I still think Linux is the answer.  The reason is that MS is 
> doing so much
> mucking around with their systems, bundling programs and 
> links to sponsors
> and such, that it's going to take as much work to clean up a Windows
> installation as it would to configure a Linux installation.  
> More and more
> offices are returning to the model of a centralised computing resource
> instead of having to support distributed individual PC's, and *NIX,
> including Linux, fits that model much better than MS' products.
> 
> 
> 
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>