Would a small business turn down a 20–40% saving on its IT costs? Probably not. So why is it even a question?
Because one side of the market advertises and the other does not
Over the past decade Microsoft has increased its sales and marketing spending by more than $6 billion, to roughly $24 billion a year. That is on the order of 6% of the entire world’s annual advertising spend, across every industry.
Open-source projects typically spend nothing at all.
So unless you work in infrastructure, you may never have heard of the alternatives – even though open source already runs a large share of the world’s web servers, servers generally, and phones, and even though the major cloud platforms lean on it heavily behind the scenes. Microsoft itself became one of the largest single contributors to open source in the world, having first embraced it out of necessity.
What that means in practice
Mature, stable office suites and collaboration platforms exist that are compatible with what you already use, have real support available, do not lock your data in, and carry a substantially lower total cost of ownership. Some have tens or hundreds of millions of users, reached almost entirely by word of mouth.
Plenty of companies are still paying high monthly fees for unstable patches and support they cannot reach. Usually not because they evaluated the alternatives and chose against them – but because nobody ever told them the alternatives were there.
Consider this the word of mouth. Technology does not have to be that painful or that expensive.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our hybrid cloud work deals with – talk to us about yours.
