If you think that the manufacturer’s sticker gave you a reliable estimate of the city mileage for that new car of yours, you should try negotiating traffic on the hills of San Francisco. You’ll discover pretty quickly that in my town, the old adage, “Your mileage may vary” has never been truer.
It’s the same with TCO (total cost of ownership) estimates for enterprise software. Commercial vendors such as Microsoft continue to use TCO as one of the biggest weapons to hammer Linux and open source — despite the fact that it’s virtually impossible for a single TCO estimate to match every possible usage case.
Link: ComputerWorld NZ
