charlie nails it.

found in charlie's diary entry spinning the hamster wheel:

One of the dirty little secrets of the computing industry is that staffing ratios are supported by Microsoft. It takes roughly one support person per forty desktops in Windows environments (one person-hour per working week wasted on coaxing balky software into doing its job, is a more accurate way of describing this), while large-scale UNIX desktop installations have staffing ratios between 1:200 and 1:1000. But bureaucratic politics is such that in any organization, an inefficient department with forty employees has far more clout, prestige, and (ultimately) money assigned to it than an efficient department of four ... because most managers are woefully inequipped to judge the relative merit of computing proposals and interpret human activity as productivity, rather than as evidence of inefficiency. We have therefore fallen into a situation where less efficient solutions competing in the marketplace are preferentially selected.

[charlie, not having had a career in system adminstration, somewhat over simplifies. endless updating/patching/upgrading of N different favorite variants of a common unix derivative does not exactly support the nice 1/10 efficiency ratio he suggests. solaris shops, on the other hand, may support the argument better.]