Is Total Cost of Ownership For Real?
TCO analysis attempts to find all important costs brought by owning and using assets such as vehicles, machinery, and information systems.
Thanks to the public discussion on Total Cost of Ownership over the last few years, most business people now understand that long-term costs should be center stage in purchase decisions.
At the same time, conflicting marketing claims and other forms of TCO misuse have no doubt damaged the reputation of the TCO metric to the point that many senior decision makers are unwilling to trust it. They may accept the legitimacy of the long term TCO concept, but they know that TCO analyses can be manipulated to end up with a desired result. They know that TCO results depend on so many factors that it means little to speak of “the TCO" for any product.
Read the complete Total Cost of Ownership overview in the Business Encyclopedia
John Dobbs of Novell said it best:
“The only valid TCO data are your own data.”