I’ve recently been talking about software engineering economics, in a very loose way, but so have other people. And now I understand that it’s annoying when people talk about it, and have decided to continue anyway. I’ve decided to continue because what I see is either inaccurate comparisons being made, or valid comparisons that have questionable applicability outside their immediate domain. The world of IT cost comparison is still run by marketing, not by operations.
Recently, I read Don’t Build Private Clouds. Subbu says that the sticker prices (up to $10k for a server that will last four years, vs. up to $1500 per month for a public cloud machine) should not be compared because there are additional costs to self-hosting:
- Engineering costs
- Network automation costs
- Loss of agility
- Opportunity costs
Fine, but what are those costs? Why do I not need to do any engineering or automation if I use a public cloud provider? If I do, what is that going to cost? What agility and opportunity do I lose by tying my infrastructure to any one cloud vendor, and what will that cost?
Subbu’s blog says that he is a “cloud helper”, and that goes a long way to explaining why we didn’t get a straight answer on the cost comparison. We’re not being told that cloud services are cheaper, instead we are being told of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt involved in choosing the less-favoured path.
Similarly, an IBM employee recently said that Macs are cheaper than PCs by up to $543 per user (remember that’s “up to”, not “as much as” – the lower bound given is $273). Let’s ignore the conflict of interest arising from Apple’s global partnership with IBM: IBM wouldn’t say that their partner systems are cheaper so that they could drum up interest in their partnership services, surely. Surely. I mean, this isn’t the IBM of 1984, is it?
What IBM’s VP says is that over a four-year lifetime, among employees who are given the choice of which platform and model computer they want, the Macs are cheaper. That’s of course a figure about which it’s possible to make realistic comparisons: given IBM’s approach to desktop support, IBM’s level of staffing, IBM’s applications, IBM’s approach to working, IBM’s budgeting for IT support operations, it’s cheaper for people who choose Macs to use Macs than for…well, it’s not clear, but it seems to be than for the “everybody else” bucket: not only people who chose PCs to use PCs, but people who weren’t given a choice to use PCs.
So before you make a textexpander macro for that link and insta-reply to anyone who uses the phrase “Apple Tax”, just how similar is your environment to IBM’s?
