Is it true that nothing is actually free? I'm not sure - literally nothing, a vacuum, costs quite a bit to make - you can get it free in space, but travelling there costs quite a bit. So you can find costs that you may have to pay for anything, but forget sophistry.
If you have a choice of whether to use a 'free' piece of software,
The real secret is to make sure that the cost is not one of your requirements. Cost on its own doesn't mean anything. Is a Rolls-Royce expensive? (no, it's a lot cheaper than a lear jet). What's important is the TCO - the Achilles heel of many cloud services is that you have to keep paying for them in five years time, when software you've bought has had four years in which to amortise the initial cost.
Even more important is the value/cost ratio. Developing your own solution may seem extremely expensive compared to buying an off-the-peg software package, but, if you base your development on a rock-solid open-source platform, then the fact that your software has been developed exactly to fit your requirements should make it better than any generic offering. So your cost/value ratio, in the long term, means that your TCO is tiny.
No comments:
Post a Comment