The costs of retraining and retrofitting was mentioned and bundled in at $800,000. My point wasn't that they didn't do their calculations, nor do I mean to sho

The costs of retraining and retrofitting was mentioned and bundled in at $800,000. My point wasn't that they didn't do their calculations, nor do I mean to show bias towards MS or Google. My point was that the amount of savings they would realize ($280,000 per year) was so marginal when the number of affected employees were taken into account. If I came up to you and said "I can give you a piece of software that will save you $1.17 per month, but I will have to sell it to you for $40", would that be a good deal? Why is it that when you multiply those numbers by 20,000 that it all of a sudden becomes a good deal? Especially when you can't be 100% certain that your cost projections are perfectly accurate, being a bit too optimistic can wipe out any hope of any savings. My point was just that because the numbers are big they look really important. But when you look at them spread across the workforce it looks different. Saving $280,000/year after 3 years is just fine. Saving $14/year after 3 years is fine too. One looks far more important than the other. If the news story said that it would save them $1.17 per user per month after 34 months, would it have the same impact? If a company says they spend 2 million dollars a year on free soda for staff, that sounds excessive. If they spend 2 million dollars per year on soda but they say that they spend 45 cents per day on average on soda per employee, does that have the same impact? In the former, you don't have any point of reference 2 million dollars is a lot of money. In the latter you immediately consider things like how much the employee's wage is, how much electricity they use, how much water they use washing their hands after using the toilet. If you have someone using a Xerox copier that charges a few cents per copied page, now their copier usage is majorly competing with the cost of soda. In the grand scheme of things though, a couple of dollars per day per employee, for professionals, can be pretty much ignored. But if you think of it instead of $1,000,000 per year, it's harder to ignore, even though it's the same thing.