We will ignore the fact taht it is a MS funded study so flawed to begin with.
The way they get their prices down is by education, caliming its cheaper to train windows programers then Liunx ones, while comparing java and vb this may be true, but perl is as easy as vb is to learn so it fails their. Add that to the fact that most companies don't hire untrained employies, they get people who have allready had the nessecary education to do the job, that removes the education costs from the issue. Wow after you do that MS is more expensive then Linux even in MS's study.