Now before I get started I want to say that I use openSUSE as my choice of Linux distribution and couldn’t be happier with it. They always seem to be on top of implementing new technologies that are easy-to-use and really appealing to those who want the latest and greatest. For example, the latest version of openSUSE includes a new KDE Start Menu that is unlike anything you’ll find in other Linux distributions.
With that being said I think Novell, the company that develops SUSE, might be taking things a little far now. They have started a website that compares their Enterprise operating system with Windows Vista, in hopes of attracting more customers. Sure, that sounds like normal competition at first but the only comparisons that they make are the ones that favor them…with the most obvious being pricing.
Novell provides a table (pictured below) that demonstrates the pricing difference between the two major versions of Vista and SUSE Linux Enterprise. They then go on to show you what the total cost (with maintenance) would be over the next year and three years, but they conveniently don’t have maintenance cost information available for their operating system, so they leave that number out of the total.
It is definitely fair for them to do such a comparison because I could have seen Microsoft doing the same thing is the situation was reversed, but this was the part that really caught my attention:
The license costs for Windows Vista Ultimate with Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 reaches a whopping $1,078. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, you receive over 90 percent of the functionality of Vista and Office for less than 10 percent of the price.
90 percent of the functionality? That sounds a little high especially if you think about the applications businesses run on their machines that probably won’t work right on Linux. I guess they are probably talking about general features, like managing photos, but that still irks me a little bit.
As far as maintenance goes I would say that the cost to maintain SUSE would be much higher than it would be for Vista. Unless you’re able to get a staff that completely understands Linux the cost for supporting the system and paying IT professionals to do training would probably total more than upgrading to Vista.
I guess that is the end of my rant, which I try not to do very often, but it seems like they are misleading people a little bit. I agree that almost all versions of Linux are probably more secure than Windows, which is probably the area that Novell should have tried to focus the attention on.
What does everyone else think about this? Is Novell going about this the wrong way or are they smart for pursuing the marketing so aggressively?
News Source: Desktop Linux
Linux vendors have been saying for years that the total cost of ownership for Linux is lower than the competing Microsoft system. The always seem to leave out employee cost as they relates to setting up, maintaining, and administering the system. Linux administrators tend to get paid a bit more then their Windows counterparts.
Microsoft products are a natural choice for business looking to save money because their product are usually easier to use than Linux.
I agree that Linux developers have been saying this for years but I haven’t actually seen one of the companies aggressively approach it this much…they have even created their own website to compare the two operating systems.
A recent study in the EU found that the cost of switching to Linux and OSS could be small enough to be paid for out of one year’s budget:
[groklaw.net]
It really depends on what company we’re talking about here. For example, Base in OpenOffice.org doesn’t do everything that Microsoft Access can do (in my experience), so if you need something that uses the more advanced features you’ll be forking out even more money to purchase Microsoft Office to run on Crossover Office for Linux. I’m sure there are plenty of companies who could make the switch quite easily, but there are also a lot who would have a really hard time making the switch.
You can save a lot of money just getting off of MS Office. Maybe some of your company’s employees rely on unique features of MS Office but I’m willing to bet the majority use it now and again to read files and very infrequently as a text editor. At Novell, we found that we could save plenty of money just moving most people off MS Office: [novell.com] (an older but representative story about the move)
[dell.com]
Email me if you have questions about this move.
Forgot my email in the last post – rysmith at novell.com
Microsoft Office does obviously cost a lot of money (more than Windows in fact), but a lot of people I know actually use Microsoft’s templates/clipart the most from it. That’s something that OpenOffice doesn’t offer much of. I don’t think the Novell Office adds any templates though.
As an employee of a large corporation, you should never have to worry about creating templates or importing clipart from MS Office. At Novell, for example, once a template is created and icons and clipart is put in a corporate library, other non-branded templates and clipart is discouraged.
I can see how those things would be a regular part of home/small business users’ use of MS Office.
Yeah, those are mostly the people that I deal with on a regular basis, but you’re definitely right about the larger corporations. Out of curiosity does Novell provide any sort of information to people who purchase the enterprise version to help make the switch from Windows? For example, the layout of the hard drive is a little different and might be unfamiliar to users (this is the complaint I get the most when introducing someone to Linux). So do you give them info that would help them find important folders they might be looking for on their hard drive?
There are 30 days of installation support for SUSE Linux Enterprise (Desktop and Server) so that would cover helping the user get it installed and perhaps an explanation of how to locate important folders.
Although end users can purchase it, this enterprise version is for businesses (large and small) so it’s generally a more broad deployment. In that case, Novell offers support and consulting to the implementation teams so they can help the end users.