Also see Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux


The former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn, says calculations his team did for upgrading office software for 50,000 desktops showed that Microsoft Office 2007 would cost four times the price of an Open Office solution.

“We did a back of the envelope sketch for implementing Open Documents versus Office 12,” Quinn, a Linux and open source advocate, told iTWire at LinuxWorld.

“When you laid it out, we assumed that you had to do about equal training because Office 12 is a new product. We attributed no cost in terms of installing Microsoft Office or Open Office on the desktop. We used a hypothetical number of 50,000 desktops and assumed that we would have to replace 20% of our desktops because they were old.

“We assumed the cost of 50,000 desktops times the cost of Office 12 which we took as the same price as Office 2003. Then we did a labour cost of the time to replace 10,000 desktops, timed at a spread of one to two and half hours. When we added all that up, it came to around $8 million for doing Open Office versus $30 million for doing the new Microsoft product.

“You could argue about my numbers but here’s what I would say to you. There’s two very compelling pieces in this where you can decide how big that differential is. If you were using Open Office it operates on Windows 95 going forward and it operates on Linux. When you go to Office 12, it doesn’t go back that far, so you knew you were going to be forced into some kind of an upgrade. So you have something that you can acquire for nothing and spend some training dollars on, or something that you have to buy. So whatever way you look at it, if it costs me zero acquisition over here and a regular cheque over here, there’s going to be a differential. And part of it is that you’re going to be forced into a migration of some part of your desktop landscape just because it can’t support what is going to be the new offering.”

And what of the contention made by Alan Yates of Microsoft that Open Office is 10 years behind the software company’s Office product?