Despite all positive technical aspects of running Linux there may be more people who are certified on Microsoft platform. Linux certs are catching up as well although they have not been around as long as Microsoft’s.

As to higher security, there are very recent reports comparing security of both Windows vs. Linux and I think that MS was much quicker in addressing security problems. Look for it on the next, I think this study was done by one of the US universities this year.

I suspect that the survey you mentioned will have TCO as the #1 answer… I’d also hazard a guess that those who ranked TCO as #1 haven’t a clue and would be unable to support their response with any sensible logic. Bob is right on the money.

Jim

BUT…
I would guess that a frightening number of executives would pick TCO – with no clue as to what’s hidden in Pandora’s box…

Bob

Regarding the dependency to vendor, back in the mid 90′s when company were implementing vendor ERP’s, the benefits sold by vendor to CEO at that time was around the establishment of “best practices” from leading industries and standardization.

Times changed, and now the best practive is to innovate and have something different that will put you ahead of the competition. With proprietary software, you have to fight against vendor to have them include a functionality in their package, or wait “long” time for the next release.

Organization are now limited in their actions since they are very dependent to vendor, and most of them have the culture of “service provider”. Until they will understand that the best long term growth strategy is to support properly customers and become a “strategic partner” (that means sharing gain ans loss) with their customers, that will enforce the trend of shifting to open source in the next 5 years or more I think. Until the actual generation of leader with “make the most profit as soon as possible, should you neglect your customer” approach will retire…

So if you have the chance of having vendor representives that are acting like a company member, think twice before moving to open source. If not, you’ll probably have benefits to have more freedom… Don’t look too much of what others are doing in terms of business case, stay close to your business.