Jeremy compares the total cost of ownership to the total pain of using.
Often times, organizations try to take TCO driven decision making to the extreme and mandate a single standard for this or that. My previous employer was, unsurprisingly, good at that too. In fact, at my old job we often referred to “The Cost of Being Different” (TCBD?). It was used to win arguments and sometimes short-circuit groups who began to stray from the herd and look at software that was not on the “approved” list, regardless of their reasons for doing so.
In theory, this all works well form a high-level organizational point of view. But if you ever venture down the ranks and ask to folks who must live with the results of TCO and/or “standardize at all costs” decision making, the tone of the discussion changes quite a bit.
Because organizations choose an inappropriate kind of standard. They learned a lesson in mass production from Henry Ford’s assembly line and from other industrial novelties: that standards enable large-scale efficiencies. This lesson is applicable to purchasing, for example, 180,000 identical chairs, where you can bargain a much lower cost per chair because of the size of your purchase. Unfortunately, they did not learn about interchangeable parts.
There are two kinds of standard in question. One says, we will all use this make of ruler. The other says, a foot is so long.
To begin with, the foot was the length of a man’s foot. My foot, however, is not the same size as your foot, so we’ll get different measurements. In time, we agreed to use someone else’s foot as the basis for measurement.