TCOs: Get the Other "Facts"

I'm not a big fan of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) studies. Their methodology is often dubious in the extreme: frequently, figures are given to a ludricous number of significant figures, even though they are trying to measure things that are hard to pin down even roughly, and then come up with an "answer". This is why Microsoft has placed them at the heart of its FUD campaign "Get the Facts" against GNU/Linux: it's so easy to get the result you want.

Still, it's useful to have some ammunition for the other side, and this report about a migration carried out in Bristol provides that. As the Guardian summarises:

Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of £670,010 for StarOffice, compared with £1,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs for Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.

The difference may turn out to be even greater, says IT strategy team leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot of the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."

Update: No TCOs here, happily, but 35,000 users have been moved to OpenOffice.org in Brazil according to this story.