Companies planning on moving their old programs to Microsoft's new .Net software plan had better prepare for sticker shock: Making the conversion could cost roughly half of the original development cost, Gartner says.
According to a new cost model devised by Gartner, the cost of moving older Windows programs to .Net may range from 40 percent to as much as 60 percent of the cost of developing the programs in the first place.
That may come as a blow to penny-pinching information systems departments in big companies, even those very familiar with Windows programming.
Typically, moving to a new software release isn't so costly. But, warns Gartner's Mark Driver, .Net isn't just a new release of Windows.
"People mistakenly assume the cost of upgrading will somehow be the same as going from one version of a well-established product to another. That's definitely not the case (with .Net)," said Driver, who devised the cost model.
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