You are only considering the up front ccst. Support and maintenance costs are not free.

Support applies to both. Maintenance cost for these two alternatives is zero, since updates are free.

Office 365 comes with paid support. As far as maintenance being zero for OpenOffice... that's not how doing IT works at all. Things will break, or users won't be able to figure out how to do things, and they WILL ask for maintenance.

my experienc eis different. When a user has a problem he goes to the colleagues he knows and then, if he's a little pro-active, he looks on the web. Pas that, in a big company, they'll just leave it there "too complicated". I don't think people ever bother to reach the person who k nows the support contact at microsoft...

And fact is, Excel or Word, are quit known everywhere so you don't need much of support.

So no, I don't think there's much of a need for support...

I don't believe in MS paid support since a glitch at servers made my uni and a hospital stop working properly for days after an update.

It doesn't come with support for the Windows workstations you need for running it though.

And they have in-house IT who are familiar with open office already