The biggest expense in software is maintenance. Better software means cheaper maintenance. If you actually want to have a significant cost advantage, software is the way to go. Sadly most business is about sales and marketing and has little to do with the cost or quality of items being sold.
You massively underestimate the difference in employee productivity not having to fight user-hostile software every step of the way can make. Not to mention cascading cost savings and infra flexibility distancing yourself from Microsoft products can grant.
It will depend on each case and what makes the marketed solution inferior. If it's overly complex and you will save development time. If it's unstable you'll save debugging time. If it's bloated you will save on hardware costs. Etc...
Most customers don't really have the knowledge needed to make choices based on technical merits, and that's why the market works as it does. I'm willing to say 95% of people on HN have this knowledge and are therefore biased to assume others are the same way. It's classic XKCD 2501.