[dtjb]

(Most) managers hate meetings just as much as you, and they're not wasting money for the fun of it. Every technical manager has inherited problems because someone at some point tried to save money by hiring a random dude on the cheap who just half assed it.

You go with companies that can demonstrate scalability because they provide project governance, proper change management, and layers of redundancy and support in the event of an emergency.

[rglullis]

When I was working at Deutsche Telekom, I actually heard the CIO from a German Bank say they "were not interested in our (Chromebook-like) solution, because if adopted it will be a lot cheaper than their current windows licenses and that would mean he would lose his budget in 2 years".

Also, the idea that someone charging $2k for two days of work is considered "doing it on the cheap" is almost offensive.

[dtjb]

Relative to the enterprise vendor, that is very much on the cheap. I wasn't placing any value on your work, I was referring to the ubiquitous "I know a guy" cost cutting solutions that end up somehow being very, very expensive in the end.

[rglullis]

I didn't mean offensive to me, the offensive part is to think as a shareholder or a taxpayer hearing that this kind of problem actually warrants so much money.

I know that people can come up with many perfectly reasonable justifications to spend this much on a service, but to someone like me who grew up in a poor country dealing with recession and austerity policies, it's hard to see these things and not thing "surely we can achieve the same results spending less?"