UNTIL RECENTLY, if you wanted to find someone who thought that a Windows-based program was cheaper than one based on Linux, you had to go all the way to Redmond. No more. Not since Microsoft paid Forrester Research's Giga Research to conduct a comparative study of the costs of developing a Web-based portal. The study compared the costs incurred by five large and midsize companies that used the Java 2 Enterprise Edition with costs incurred by seven large and midsize companies that used .Net applications. For large corporations in the study, the cost of using Microsoft products for development and deployment plus three years of maintenance was 28 percent less than the cost for J2EE/Linux.
|