Some time ago, I had the opportunity to speak frankly with the then CTO of the NYC department of education, and pitched them on the idea of replacing Windows wi

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to speak frankly with the then CTO of the NYC department of education, and pitched them on the idea of replacing Windows with Linux, or at least MS Office with OpenOffice, touting both the Free-as-in-Speech and Free-as-in-Beer benefits, as well as the lower hardware costs. What they told me was that similar pitches from vendors like RedHat were useful to them in that they invariably prompted Microsoft to offer a deal, IIRC, somewhere around 1$/month/computer (annually, about the cost of a new keyboard; which they had to buy a lot of), and that they had to replace the computer hardware often enough due to wear and tear (students are very hard on computers) that the hardware savings would be illusory. If I were to try and make a similar pitch today I might try calculating in the cost of electricity, but there is simply no way Microsoft is going to let itself be undercut on price for the software per-se for those big marquee accounts. Of course when taking competitive bids like that, you really should price in the eventual switching costs when comparing bids, but hardly anyone does that correctly in the public OR private sector, and sunk-cost fallacies tends to overwhelm the decision making process.