Editing Windows 2000 (section)

== Total cost of ownership ==
In October 2002, Microsoft commissioned [[International Data Corporation|IDC]] to determine the [[total cost of ownership]] (TCO) for [[enterprise application]]s on Windows 2000 versus the TCO of the same applications on [[Linux]]. IDC's report is based on telephone interviews of IT executives and managers of 104 North American companies in which they determined what they were using for a specific workload for file, print, security and networking services.
IDC determined that the four areas where Windows 2000 had a better TCO than Linux – over a period of five years for an average organization of 100 employees – were file, print, network infrastructure and security infrastructure. They determined, however, that Linux had a better TCO than Windows 2000 for web serving. The report also found that the greatest cost was not in the procurement of software and hardware, but in staffing costs and downtime. While the report applied a 40% productivity factor during IT infrastructure downtime, recognizing that employees are not entirely unproductive, it did not consider the impact of downtime on the profitability of the business. The report stated that Linux servers had less unplanned downtime than Windows 2000 servers. It found that most Linux servers ran less workload per server than Windows 2000 servers and also that none of the businesses interviewed used 4-way [[Symmetric multiprocessing|SMP]] Linux computers. The report also did not take into account specific [[application server]]s – servers that need low maintenance and are provided by a specific vendor. The report did emphasize that TCO was only one factor in considering whether to use a particular IT platform, and also noted that as management and server software improved and became better packaged the overall picture shown could change.<ref>"[http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/TCO.pdf Windows 2000 Versus Linux in Enterprise Computing] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080410033809/http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/TCO.pdf |date=April 10, 2008 }}," ''IDC''.</ref>