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Blog: Pete Loshin

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What Price Vista? The $5,000 Upgrade!

Here's an interesting discussion about the true cost per desktop to upgrade to Microsoft Vista at Slashdot.org.

What prompted that? A little article, The Vista budget vacuum, in which James Gaskin estimates in his column in ITworld.com Small Business that the cost of new hardware, software, and servers related to the Vista upgrade may be as high as $5,000 for each and every one of your PCs.

James is a great guy, smart and funny and very knowledgeable, and he makes a good point: existing systems won't be usable with Vista, and you'll need to upgrade more than just the OS to make it worthwhile.

However, if your company assigns a usable lifetime to end-user PCs for a periodic replacement schedule, you'll have already budgeted for company-wide system replacement over that period--so your costs may be negligable.

The bigger worry will be about maintaining interoperability between different Windows versions for the duration of the replacement period.

  Posted by Pete Loshin on October 5, 2006 12:00 PM |

Comments

And here is an IDC study with more information on what Microsoft's new Vista could cost/benefit you. In Europe, this will increase revenues for companies (people) who are within the Microsoft "industry". But it will also be taking away funding and focus from non-MS industries too.

http://biforbusinesspeople.blogspot.com/2006/09/microsoft-could-cost-you-more.html

Posted by: Tom Hudock | October 10, 2006 10:40 AM

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