THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

From Businessweek....“But Ballmer may have a tough time persuading customers that Windows is cheaper than Linux. It often isn't. With Windows, end users pay an up-front fee that ranges from several hundred dollars for a PC to several thousand for a server, while there's no such charge for Linux. The total cost over three years for a small server used by 30 people, including licensing fees, support, and upgrade rights, would be about $3,500 for Windows, compared with $2,400 for a Red Hat subscription, say analysts. “

SBS 2003 standard with 5 cals..      $   520.00

20 SBS cal.....................................$1,830.00

5 SBS cals ...............................     $   459.00

That's $2,700 in my book for a full retail [and obviously cheaper if you are upgrading from SBS 4.5... now if you want to add Software assurance...that might get you up to that $3,500....but Redhat's “upgrade rights“ are not the same as Software Assurance. 

But for Redhat, I'm not seeing where they are getting that $2,400, as I see a base of $900 or so but OS upgrades are not the same as Software Assurance.  Oh I see now what they compare... they compared it to THIS one which I don't think is comparable at all.

As far as support, I can find SBS support, I'd have a hard time to find Linux support locally that I'd trust [I'm a control freak] and quite frankly I love that I don't have to worry about security issues on two platforms. Patching is needed on any software, any platform and the sooner we all realize that the bad guys are going after anything that computes, the better off we are. 

Funny thing is, the theme of this year's Bill Gates memo of interoperability is something that us SBSboxes have been doing a lot lately with attaching Macs to our servers.  [me thinks he's just catching up with what we already do out here in agile small businesses, eh'?]

Let's go off to Dell shall we and get a server for 30 people?  In fact on this page you can get a better comparison of what the operating system prices do and playing around I get $1,756 that INCLUDES the hardware and then if you do a 5 pack of the cals, you get $2,300... which means we're about at $4,000 to drive a box off the showroom floor that INCLUDES THE HARDWARE.  What do you want to bet when those “analysts“ pushed the pencils they included hardware in those totals?

Folks... I think the moral to this story is “don't listen to analysts” as they have no clue as to comparing or pricing products.  Pick a product that does the job that your client needs and ask in the communities what has worked for others.  I have the knowledge and know how to secure and support Microsoft products.  I'm not as comfortable on other platforms even though I use them in vmware settings on my laptop.

Push your own pencils and make your own decision....and about that “the culture is cooperative, meritocractic” and all that?  You haven't hung around the communities of SBS, have you?