Apples and Oranges <strike>Can I have 1785$ per user for messaging too please?</strike>

Update: I promise: no more mental math at 1am in the morning. Post revised.
IBM invented FUD, but Microsoft turned it into an art. On their website they have an entertaining set of claims. I leave it up to you to judge their credibility. The real fun part is the Godiva case study. According to Microsoft the 1400 people company saved $250,000 per year by moving to Microsoft. That would turn into $178 per user/year. Of course that calculation is riddled with question marks. Lets remove the Oranges and compare Bananas with Bananas. There are 2 moves: one is from "I-run-my-own-server" to "happy-in-the-cloud", the other is switching products. So lets have a look:

• When comparing deployment diagrams Exchange looks rather complex. The license stack doesn't look better. That might be one of the driving reasons for Microsoft to offer cloud. But what I wonder is how could they spend so much on running Domino? Back in 2002 Ferris conducted a study about Domino TCO. They found R5 would typically cost $22 user/month, while R6 would push that to $6 user/month. In R7 Ferris calculated additional 15% savings, with additional improvements with Notes 8.0 and Notes 8.5, especially around storage (DAOS), policies and monitoring. I checked with people who run efficient Domino installations and they run Domino, Sametime, Quickr, Protector at running cost of $6-7 user/month. So the number of products has increased and probablt the mailbox sizes, but no the cost. That leaves quite some money for licenses and hardware
• But we are going cloud. So we compare to LotusLive Notes. The site says it is $5 user/month list price (or $3 if web only mail will do - like the factory floor workers). But let us us do more. Let's add file sharing (that also works with outside parties) and collaboration like IBM Activities or IBM Communities and Symphony live. This pushes the list price to $7 user/month. Finally we throw in web conferencing that allows to invite external guests for free. We end up at $10 user/month. That makes $120 user/year.

So when I shall save $178 user/year someone needs to pay me $58. (I know it isn't accurate, since there are people and servers etc. involved. But moving to LotusLive Notes is pretty much one cross cert, a few policies and then replication. So no cost for engaging and licensing BinaryTree). In German we call such claims " Milchmädchenrechnung". And we haven't looked at the apps yet.
Readying the flame proof underwear.
Update Thx for all the comments. Its good to know that there is some readership