[madao]

When people start mentioning price for these sorts of things I get a little confused, volume licensing for a bunch of hyper-v servers running 20-30 windows guests is actually quite cheap (you only have to pay for each licensed host server) I also have seen mention of a per user cost for ad? not sure where you got that from... I think exchange goes for about 6 bucks a user or so.. the next office setup ill be looking at will be three beefy hyper-v servers and running most applications on windows core... windows is now getting to the point where the only time I need to do any work is for weekly windows updates.

[theatrus2]

A 5-user CAL pack for Exchange is ~$400, about $75 per user.

http://www.amazon.com/Exchange-Standard-2010-English-User/dp...

A Windows server CAL is about $20 per device.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416...

Windows licensing is somewhat a mess, between user CALs, device CALs, processor CALs, or combinations thereof. You can see why Google's $50/user/year price is attractive - no hardware to buy, no CALs to buy, no client software to buy.

[jeremiep]

Some companies have more than 20-30 employees. All these "quite cheap" expenses quickly add up. This is money better spent towards getting a better product on the shelves.

Now when you consider that managing unix machines requires much less work to begin with, you can't look at "quite cheap" the same way anymore - it's actually "quite expensive".

Not to mention I often see improved performance of server applications just by switching them to a linux host. Samba 4 is indeed very good news.