Reply to post: Re: Here we go again.

Re: Here we go again.

Since we're looking at this purely financially, OK, I'll have a go.

First, I'm taking for granted that you have a business continuity plan, refreshed every so often, for what happens if any of the vendors you rely so heavily on decide to either increase prices beyond the break even point or simply stop licensing the software to you (winding up, etc.). I don't see the costs for maintaining this plan in your analysis, but will assume similar costs will accrue from a different angle on the open source side.

Notably I don't see retraining costs in your analysis. Windows is a constantly moving UX target, most of the apps for it are going the same way. Retraining is expensive, continuous retraining even more so. I'm assuming you did train the employees at least once at some point, so as to ensure the productivity numbers are real and not just a factor of familiarity with other software outside of the working environment, so you should have a cost for that to estimate annual retraining costs in the Windows ecosystem. My employer saw productivity drop to far below 1/3 of what it was when certain classes of employee were forced to Windows 10 and due to the significant costs that accrued an emergency plan was put in place to move those apps to Wine on Linux. Productivity was restored, yes with a bit more outlay, but lessons were learned on over-dependence on proprietary software for business critical operations.

Part of your business continuity plan also needs to consider how you are handing the Microsoft shift to a subscription model. I see you are relying heavily on pay-once licensing, then keeping that license installed for as long as possible, which makes you a fairly bad customer in Microsoft's metrics. The trend is to shift customers like you onto an annual paid model, especially if you try to grow. Microsoft has always had a model of "dirt cheap for small business to get you hooked, then raise the expense as you grow." -- isn't part of your duty to the company to make sure that growth isn't hindered by outside software vendors and licensing schemes?

You also need to add the cost of maintaining a proper inventory of all proprietary software usage and licenses, for presentation to external auditors who will screw you to the wall if they find any pirated commercial software installed on any system in your company. These costs, both for software inventory control and for auditing / legal battles are absent in your analysis.

I'm also unsure of why you didn't include the licensing costs for the business critical application itself in the totals.

What I've found is that normally when you look at the actual TCO of whatever it is you're licensing, if you've more than a handful of employees in a company that isn't at the wall already, you're getting really close to the cost of writing an in-house replacement built on open software. And when you finally make that step, you can increase productivity even more as the software is tailored to your business processes and is updated on your schedule, not an outside vendor's.

And I'm not even going into how certain companies need to keep the GDPR fines that will be rolling in, especially for Office 365 usage with protected data, as a significant potential cost on their balance sheets. The early signs of this are already in this asture publication, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows are not GDPR compliant and regulators (and more importantly end users, who can make ICO complaint after providing the protected data) are slowly starting to realize that.

If you're a victim, it's because your company is either microscopic, doing very badly financially, or manglement doesn't understand the concept of "TCO" and can't read industry trends. Granted, the latter tends to be very, very common, along with backhanders from certain large Washington based corporations.