It's not. But from what I've heard, it's much less than that perseat.
I'm saying that the PIs of most university labs would gladly pay several times the retail price of XP just to be able to continue having support for multi-thousand-dollar instruments.
But I think this nitpicking over a relatively minor point--the important part is that upgrading from XP to 7 costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per computer for some people.
Edit:
In case you were referring to the sentence "$10k buys a lot of...," I can see how my intent was unclear (and I was sort of talking about both small and large labs at the same time). My understanding was that there is a minimum buy-in for extended support (something like $100k per year), but that such a contract would cover hundreds or thousands of computers. That's on the order of $100 to $1k per PC.
A medium-sized university lab might have dozens of instruments costing on the order of $10k to $100k. Now, paying $100k to support $100k worth of instruments for a year doesn't make too much sense, but paying a few hundred dollars per $10k instrument does. Even at $1k per PC per year, avoiding an instrument purchase buys a least a decade of extended support. It's just a question of getting a critical mass (or, by convincing Microsoft to open up the program to smaller organizations).
Comments
It's not. But from what I've heard, it's much less than that per seat.
I'm saying that the PIs of most university labs would gladly pay several times the retail price of XP just to be able to continue having support for multi-thousand-dollar instruments.
But I think this nitpicking over a relatively minor point--the important part is that upgrading from XP to 7 costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per computer for some people.
Edit: In case you were referring to the sentence "$10k buys a lot of...," I can see how my intent was unclear (and I was sort of talking about both small and large labs at the same time). My understanding was that there is a minimum buy-in for extended support (something like $100k per year), but that such a contract would cover hundreds or thousands of computers. That's on the order of $100 to $1k per PC.
A medium-sized university lab might have dozens of instruments costing on the order of $10k to $100k. Now, paying $100k to support $100k worth of instruments for a year doesn't make too much sense, but paying a few hundred dollars per $10k instrument does. Even at $1k per PC per year, avoiding an instrument purchase buys a least a decade of extended support. It's just a question of getting a critical mass (or, by convincing Microsoft to open up the program to smaller organizations).