Discussion on:

Are we allowed to mention cheaper is not always better?

good, fast, cheap. Pick 2, you can't have all 3.

You have to remember that when you use external be it the cloud or VoIP (Skype, MagicJack, Primus, etc) you are putting your business in the hands of someone else. What if you cloud provider goes down? How long are they down for? Can you run your business without that data and how much do you lose per hour down? What happens if Skype is down or not available? Maybe employees can use their cell phones to call out but what about customers calling in? You may be able to give sales a tablet but not a design engineer or programmer.

One has to do a risk analysis and decide how long can you be down and how much does it cost per hour when you are down. CIOs and management need to do this rather than jumping on the last ad on the back page of that tech magazine.

Are we allowed to mention that cheaper isn't always good enough and will never remain good enough?

The answer to both questions is of course, no.

Well not unless you wish to suffer the traditional fate of a heretic...

don't think you can win, just point out how all that cloud stuff is supposed to be platform independent and that they can save a hell of a lot more by not buying Windows at all but putting Linux on to run the browsers and thus extend the life of their current hardware by many years. Go with Zorin OS with the Win 7 or Win XP desktop GUI, and it should be an easy sale.

I've found the best argument being the prison sentence they face for violating various federal and state laws about the management of privacy related data.

yes - think back a decade to the irresistable prospect of being able to virtualise ALL your production servers, reduce power and hosting footprints, maximise use of server resources, provision servers in minutes and deliver resilience beyond imagining. Then, the counter arguments were customers were putting all their eggs in one basket, that they needed phenomenal amounts of hardware to deliver performance+resilience which in many cases wiped out the advantages of virtualisation. At the time I counselled using virtual hosts for develpment environments where performance and resilience weren't so key. This time I say the same thing. Use it for development servers first and when you've uncovered all the gotchas, move your prod environments on there. But will they listen? Will they heck!

Everyone wants to save money. Saving money is good. That is what everyone learns growing up. But there are so many ways that saving money is not even close to being the best way that it is hard to convince people. Saving money in the short term can and frequently does do the opposite in the long term. A case in point. Most people are at least aware of situations where short term 'savings' become long term disasters. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) made a decision to save money by outing a large portion of their technical staff. They thought that they were saving money. Those positions were replaced with cheaper offshore people' They were totally and absolutely wrong as they discovered on June 9 this year. Some of the people who they had not discharged attempted a weekend update to CA7 (a commonly used scheduling system worldwide). For some reason, the upgrade failed and needed to be backed out. Only the people who installed it did not have the proper authority to do that, so it was done by an outsourced resource. The backout was successful, but the person in India also wound up deleting their entire production schedule. They couldn't run any of their systems as a large organization must do things in a certain order or things will not work properly. With no production schedule, RBS was essentially turned into a 19th century bank. They had no access to their computer based data RBS is (or at least was) the largest bank in the world. They could open their offices to accept and disperse small amounts of money, but major systems were (and as of mid October I have not heard anything about them recovering) unavailable. Some time ago I saw an estimate that their direct costs in this fiasco were in excess of 100 million Pounds (Great Britain). I have seen nothing about the cost to recover or what it is costing their customers. So they saved a minuscule amount of money and did major damage to the business. The problem was clearly caused by an inadequately trained person with the wrong level of system authority. That person was inexpensive compared to the person he replaced and the damage he did was enormous. This type of problem is happening with outsourcing all over the world. Short term cheap translates to long term expensive (or catastophic).

And, of course, more expensive is not always better either.

1.1% Linux market share ? First, please show the percentages for Servers as well not just Desktops. Then consider the market share of Desktop Linux in India and China. The figures for Linux are totally inaccurate as it is a hidden quantity, with Microsoft and other figures being based on sales - but there are no sales of Linux to compare. Then there are so many Linux flavours that a comparison becomes impossible. As a further example, what about the people and companies who are following Linux From Scratch and building their own Linux flavours. Then consider all the devices that have embedded Linux like D-Link NAS devices.
Linux with KDE is easy for any Windows User to use, and many applications now in use on Windows started life on Linux, BSD, and Unix.
If you doubt that Linux is marching forward and think Microsoft will continue to dominate, remember Digital Research and CP/M, most people thought they would never be displaced, but where are they now ?
Also consider that Apple OS/X is really a Linux "type" system and Apple has been outselling Microsoft.

The figures for desktop market share were compiled by interrogating data from 40,000 websites and the OS's that visited those sites; the data could never be interpreted to show worldwide adoption of Linux, but rather is indicative, I feel, of the breakdown of OS's in use by the average Western user. Point taken about West vs. East - I suspect a study of desktop OS's worldwide along with the amount of uptime or fettling time required to keep them working would make interesting reading.
I feel in the longer term you're right that OS's will be cheaper, but would bet recent trends of Apple and MS charging way less for the OS will see them maintain popularity and market share. Ease of support will be critical and the single-flavour of OS, along with the greater tie-in between hardware and OS (Apple today, but MS soon?) will carry significant weight. Whether any support advantages (i.e. time taken to maintain) justify the increased cost of these OS's will be for users and IT departments to decide.

Does anyone remember the quote from Armageddon where Rockhound mentions that they are sitting on over on millions of pounds of fuel, close to 300 thousands of parts and all built by the lowest bidder...

In one should apply a Gaussian curve involving lowest price bidding, purchases etc.. Essentially, the lowest and highest prices are rejected where all other fit into a best fit scenario.