What a Vista Upgrade Will Really Cost You

narramissic writes, "James Gaskin wrote an interesting article this week about what he recons it will really cost organizations to upgrade to Vista. Gaskin estimates that each Vista user will 'cost your company between $3,250 and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. Money will go to Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007, to hardware vendors for new PCs and components, and possibly a few bucks to Apple for those users jumping to a Mac.'" Any sense of how realistic those figures are?

FUD

Most of the hardware costs would be there anyway as part of a normal IT refresh cycle. So I call BS.
-nB

Re:FUD

Not exactly true.

Many small to medium size companies choose not to lease or buy "Big Brand"; meaning, you don't always get a new Windows COA on a piece of hardware.

I just finished a new business install w/ a dual xeon server and 6 workstations. My build estimate was substantially lower than Dell and landed the job. (Specifically, my server build was lower than Dell by nearly $800 for the same hardware -- neither of us providing Win2k3 SBS. The workstations, also beating Dell by nearly $200 per box, all used recycled Win 2k Pros -- COA's pulled from retail, not OEM, licenesed systems that the client provided from their last business).

End nut? New hardware that did not come packaged with new Windows.

Had the client been forced to buy new licenses for the workstations (and not recycle existing, valid, licenses), the cost would have been an extra $870 for OEM XP Pro's.

Now, the client has a rock solid workstation using an OS that is already proven with their OS/Software choice. And they are thrilled.

Any reason to move forward to XP (with another OS migration in the next 1-2 years)? No.

Would the migration to Vista have cost this client more if they had chosen big built OEM? Absolutely, especially when one considers the cost of the new equipment (Microsoft Tax included), and then a secondary migration to Vista a year down the road.

Remember, not everyone leases with a dollar buyout to ride the write off. There are many businesses that are working on a small(er) budget that will definately pay more for the transition.

The nitpicking line is now open... fire away.

Re:Exactly...

So just get two or more spares ready for deployment in an emergency! If you need 50 identical desktops, buy enough bits for 55 machines. If one goes down, you bung in a spare while you fix it -- substituting parts from another, known good machine. The original spare stays put and the fixed machine then becomes another spare.

Installing identical software on many machines is easy too. Either use dd to copy an entire drive (BTW, this even works with Windows: boot from a USB device if possible, otherwise a DVD+RW drive [DMA-capable, won't slow down the bus] on hdb and have hard drives on hda and hdc); or set up your own local mirror of your favourite distro, and install over the LAN via http or ftp.

Re:FUD

Hardware warranty on parts, one hour labor on parts replacement. Most business clients agree with my recomendations to purchase additional necessaries (i.e. on hand replacement of HD and DVD). In the event of HD failure, a replacement is on hand and the failed unit is then sent back for warranty replacement.

As I'm in a relatively small town, with a shop on Main St (literally), most of my business clients are within a 5 minute walk. And as such, if a business client needs me now. I place an "out of the shop for an hour" sign on the door and am at their disposal.

To answer the question above parent about undercutting Dell not being worth it:

It's funny. Everyone talks about how business need to evolve to make the required changes to compete. In my situation, it's actually very easy.

I don't sell computers. I sell a service. When a client comes in for a consultation with me, we sit down and map out their needs. I provide the client with a selection of hardware choices and include my recomendation. Once components have been selected, I provide the client with either Newegg or Tigerdirect ordering numbers (in the case of Newegg, I offer to setup a preliminary client account w/o financials, and fill their cart). The client actually orders their own parts and I assemble and provide a one year (hardware) service warranty on each assembled system.

My billing is very simple that way -- I don't handle inventory, so there's no taxable sales. I provide service only and charge flat rate service fees that are set as to complexity and provide scalable discount for quantity. i.e. Workstation builds are $150 a pop. More than three builds gives a 10% discount, five builds - 15%.

I sketched the initial idea and handed it to my accountant for refinement. I now have a very simple business model that is beginning (after two years) to show some real stability.

The majority of my PC business is walk in cleaning jobs and reinstalls for Mom and Dad. Occasionally I get to build cool stuff (high end gaming rigs and HTPC's), I've got 8 systems on the floor for closed LAN party gaming, a 12'x 10' chromakey green screen for novelty digital photo's, and now we're branching out to cover novelty karaoke recording and mobile garage band and gig recording on the weekends.

So, again, when asked how it's worth competing with Dell... because I don't try and rape each client for every last dollar they have. I offer advice and reasonable service charges.

Fortunately, my wife and I own our home. We have no children (or plans for them) and, generally value our friends, and peace of mind more than keeping up with the Jones family.

Also -- we try and incorporate our own personal interests into our business (I'm a musician, therefore: recording, she's an artist and photographer: so, greenscreen photography. We both like gaming - so, closed LAN parties on Saturday nights).

The last part sounds a bit preachy, sorry. But after the article yesterday on dwindling IT jobs in the country (and a few very solid reader comments about hardware support and instllation), I just felt verbiage heavy.

It's easy to compete, when you don't. Use the current market as an advantage and wipe away your inventory. If you don't have the pockets to compete with Walmart, Circuit City or CompUSA... don't. Use online sellers to your advantage and build off their lower prices.

Works for me.

Re:FUD

Not really true; the hardware will come with a Vista license when you buy it.

So the requried hardware for Vista didn't really cost me anything extra because it was I was going to buy it anyway as part of my system upgrade cycle (I have a system upgrade cycle?!?), and Vista didn't cost me anything because it came "free" with the hardware.

Well that's a relief. I thought that money I was going to spend was real. I can't wait to tell the CFO the money I'm telling he's spending doesn't really cost him anything.

And I guess the good news is that I'm no longer paying this same nothing twice, too.

Re:FUD

How will the hardware cost be 1/2 the cost when you factor in vista/office. At 3-5k...50% of that is 1.5-2.5k. Vista/office for business is not going to cost that much.
While many desktop users "are still fine with machines purchased 3-4 (or more) years ago" that does not make it a good thing to do. I know desktop users who are fine with win95/98....do you recommend they stay on those platforms? I sure don't. While users who are using winXP are going to be fine for the next few years, they will eventually need to upgrade. Nobody is saying run to the store the moment vista hits the shelves (well except MS and people who will reap some benefits from those sales) - most people will say wait until SP-1 (/. people will say wait until SP-3552352).

The cost to upgrade will be there, but for organizations who have been using XP for a number of years, they have gotten their use out of it. They can stay on XP, but it will not cost 1.5 to 2.5k to upgrade.

Re:depends on the company

Or more than 640K of memory - that should be enough for anyone :)

heh

good point, but I'd say that current word processing, email, web browsing and spreadsheeting technologies are at a point where tossing more hardware at them makes no discernable difference after about a gig of ram and a one gigaherz processor. Number crunching, Image and movie manipulation is an other matter. Most offices don't do those things.

Re:heh

I've got two or three applications that are the drivers for hardware upgrades. Unsurprisingly, one application is a tax package - the issue is code bloat, but I'm not sure if it's in the software or in the tax code :)

Because we need to keep a number of machines fairly current, I can spread around the older machines to places where they are useful two or three times until they are either no longer useful or have been supplanted by something better.

For the record, I've still got some PII-233 machines out and about - I don't believe in upgrading for the sake of upgrading!

Try Telling That to the Coders

While I was the Desktop Support Supervisor in a development house, I spent a considerable amount of time listening to programmers with 2.8GHz machines complain that they needed dual cores. When they got dual cores, the ones with 1GB of RAM needed 2GB. Also, their wrists hurt and HR said we had to get them ergonomic keyboards. When we got them generic ergonomic keyboards, they demanded MS Naturals.

I agree that this article is a bit over the top, but you'd be amazed at what a slippery slope new hardware can become. My job was to drag my feet on purchasing while my boss tried to convince the executives that we didn't need to spend more money, but usually it was us and the CFO against the CEO, the COO and the development VPs. My boss's boss's boss, the CIO, always tried to appear neutral, so we almost never really said "no" to a hardware request.

Somewhat on topic, my blog [kennethpike.com] post from last night expresses my not-so-technical feelings on Vista. Short version: after messing with it for a couple hours, I went and downloaded Ubuntu.

Re:Try Telling That to the Coders

Of course, the average cost of a good developer, total to the company, is around $60-90 per hour. That's $500-750 per day. If having the latest hardware around makes them even slightly more productive, or gives them a reason to work an extra hour per week (not day, week), that pays for a new, kick-ass system every six months or so -- and that's assuming that you just shred the old hardware.

Re:depends on the company

That is until you put Vista on it.

I tried RC1 over the weekend. With a 2 ghz processor and 1 gb RAM, at Idle I was pushing 70% physical RAM usage and a constant 10% load on the processor. I wrestled with Neverwinter Nights till it ran and the graphics lag was unbearable, not unplayable, but when it runs qwuite smoothly on the same system with XP or 2K3 server, there is an issue.

Re:FUD

yeah, but do you NEED to do this refresh is the question. Everything I've seen of Vista looks like XP without the usability/stability (I know, still beta). These cotsts would be part of a cycle, but why do the cycle inthe first place?

Re:FUD

Of my company (~80K employees) about 2/3 have IBM/Lenovo notebooks. The other 1/3 are dell notebooks or desktops. A rolling three year window is used to determine upgrades, and yes it's required. When the dot bomb happened and we pushed to a 4 year cycle support costs in that last year were dramatically higher than the other years. The knee in the curve appeared to happen at 3 years 3 months (quaterly mapping).

If your department/company is on desktops then the upgrade costs for a rollout will be minimal anyway as a vista PC will likely only be a couple hundred more than a bottom end XP box from dell, and I'm sure the entire optiplex line will be Vista compatible.
-nB

Re:FUD - A lot of misconceptions here...

If your department/company is on desktops then the upgrade costs for a rollout will be minimal anyway as a vista PC will likely only be a couple hundred more than a bottom end XP box from dell, and I'm sure the entire optiplex line will be Vista compatible.

Not to pick on you in particular, but there is a pretty big misconception out there that Vista requires everybody to upgrade hardware. I was at a TechNet event (mandatory for work) last week regarding Vista deployment and the MS rep stood in front of 1000+ people and told us that officially, Vista absolutely WILL run on *any* box that comes with a Microsoft "Designed for XP" sticker on it, which most people are already using in a corporate environment (and if you're not, then you're clearly not the early-adopter type anyhow). Part of the install checks your hardware capabilities and turns off eye-candy and such to (hopefully) make a reasonable-performing system.

There is reason to be skeptical that it will perform just as good as XP, on exactly the same hardware, but he said that this was one of Microsoft's priorities.

Anyhow, my point is that most people won't *need* to upgrade just to run Vista. XP Ready == Vista Ready (although not necessarily "Vista Optimal").

Re:FUD

I think an interesting analysis would be a comparison between the cost of upgrading to Vista and switching the entire office to Linux.

What would be the cost of:

- replacing/training desktop support?
- training the rest of the workforce?
- lost productivity due to the above?

Re:FUD

Now that's Microsoft-funded FUD, so I'd rather not see that report.

Yup.® FUD

Aero is not required on corporate PCs so scratch the video upgrade. We deployed Windows XP with the dummied-down Windows 2000 interface and expect to do the same with Vista. We do allow users to change to the Fisher-Price UI if they like, though.

Corporate customers don't pay between $750 and $1k for Office - our enterprise licensing for Microsoft products (which includes the OS, Office Professional and Server and Exchange CALs) runs about $200 per PC per year.

Huh?

Does Windows Vista no longer support Office 2000? Why not update all your networking cable to fiber, while you are at it?

Why the heck do you need to upgrade everything at once?

Re:Huh?

But if you'ree using Office 2000, you don't need Vista. The OS on its own is useless for a business. In fact, so is the PC. People are spending that much just to run office.

Re:Huh?

Honestly, I do have to give Microsoft a bit of marketing credit for using years in their product names. When machines were refreshed around my office last year, a coworker of mine started hemming and hawing about how he needed an update to Office 2000, because it was 5 years old. The thing is, he has absolutely no problem using the other programs that he does that are 5 years old and 2 versions out of date. He doesn't think of it in terms of "I'm using version 5 when version 7 is out there." But he does notice that he's using Office 2000 in the year 2006...

Here is the breakdown:

$2000: New Hardware
$ 900: Vista License
$2100: Solid Gold Mouse

Article Text

Strange times indeed when the stock market analysts hope a new Microsoft operating system will counteract the declining housing market, but that's the hope of some for next fall. If your company plans to play the Vista game, start cooking your books now.

I estimate each Vista user will cost your company between $3,250 and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. Money will go to Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007, to hardware vendors for new PCs and components, and possibly a few bucks to Apple for those users jumping to a Mac. After all, if Apple's higher cost has been the factor keeping your company from trying a Mac, that factor just washed away.

Why $3,250-$5,000? Here's my calculation. Feel free to tell me what your company has budgeted, and whether you believe your own numbers.

New PCs will cost $1,500-$2,000. Darn few existing corporate PCs will have the video horsepower needed to run Aero, Vista's primary upgrade inducement. You need 256MB of video RAM to run Aero properly, no matter what Microsoft's marketing says. I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM. Upgrade? While in the PC, add memory: Vista needs a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The hardware cost of the RAM may be less than your labor costs getting that installed in every PC. If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well.

Depending on your volume purchasing agreements, new copies of Vista and Office will total between $750 and $1,000. After all, your company always buys the "professional" packages, right? And they have to be installed, right? If you're getting a much cheaper quote on both packages installed and tested, let me know.

The real value of Vista and Office 2007 includes new collaboration services. This means new back end servers. Most estimates place the back end support cost at $2,000 per user, but I used a range of $1,000-$2,000 for my calculations. Why get Office 2007 if not new SharePoint and Exchange servers? Can you run both on one box? Didn't think so.

Document your objections now, because next year the vice presidents will blame IT for their busted budget. But the housing market appreciates you taking up the slack. James E. Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986. Write him at mailto: james.gaskin@itworld .com.

New Hardware?

I doubt all the computers have been there as long as XP has. There's got to be quite a few that are only a year or two old. Those ones should be able to handle Vista. Ones that are even 3 years old should be okay as long as Aero/Glass is turned off. And hey, it's cheaper to just upgrade the RAM in the computers they have (which is probably the main thing that'd need to be upgraded) than to go buy a bunch of brand-spankin'-new computers.

Moo

Any sense of how realistic those figures are?

Sounds to me as realistic as the numbers in this story [slashdot.org].

OK, some details.

New PCs will cost $1,500-$2,000.

Um, no, they won't. A new computer *without* corporate discounts is 25%-30% of that.

Darn few existing corporate PCs will have the video horsepower needed to run Aero

Methinks this person knows not what he speaks of. My "corporate" computer is more powerful than my (admittedly older) gaming PC.

Vista's primary upgrade inducement.

Is this guy serious? The "primary" upgrade inducment is looks? I bet he doesn't have a girlfriend...

Vista, for better or worse, has quite a bit more to offer than just "looks".

You need 256MB of video RAM to run Aero properly, no matter what Microsoft's marketing says.

So, i should believe this guy more than MS. Granted MS has a stake in saying it needs less, but this guy seems to have it in for MS just the same.

I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM.

Even if that was true, why does that affect corporate PCs, which are usually higher quality.

Upgrade? While in the PC, add memory: Vista needs a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The hardware cost of the RAM may be less than your labor costs getting that installed in every PC.

Actually, if we're talking corporate, upgrades are rarely done for a variety of reasons.

If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista,

I assumed this meant "existing". Exiting is a different word, having nearly the opposite meaning.

I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well.

And sarcasm? *This* is an article?

The rest of the "article" is worse FUD than MS puts out.

forgot an f

I think he forgot an "f", making it 25-30% off that, which is completely reasonable for a desktop machine. 2000$ - 600$ = 1400$ which is what you cite.

App upgrade cost shouldn't be counted

The cost needs to be broken down into:

1) Hardware upgrades that would have happened anyways. Apply the "Microsoft Tax" and cost of supporting Vista -or- the manpower cost to install XP to the vista-upgrade cost, leave the rest segregated.
2) Application Software upgradest that would have happened anyways, or that would have happened but for the fact the new software requires Vista
3) The cost of upgrading vista, including supporting Vista, training end-users, license fees, Microsoft Tax on new computers if tax is above license fee for the version of XP you were using, and for companies NOT upgrading, the manpower involved to "downgrade" from Vista to XP.

Yes, that's right, "upgrading" to Microsoft will cost you manpower for every new MS-license-equipped PC even if you stick with XP. Happy Happy Joy Joy.

Office and Windows?

What organization upgrades Office and Windows at the same time? Are the older versions of Office not going to run on Vista or am I missing something? Last I was in charge of tech support, even though our University contract got us the latest software cheap (from a departmental perspective), we were always very leery about deploying one piece of new software. Deploying two new pieces of software at or near the same time sounds like you're asking for trouble. I could see that firgure being accurate in such a case because of the sheer amount of tech support you're wishing upon yourselves.

New PC's to cost $1500-2000?

Sign me up for that company! As resident IT guy here, I usually buy boxes for $400 and spend an extra $50-100, depending on current market value, to upgrade the RAM. Depending on the user, another $50 to give them a Geforce 6200 w/ dual monit