Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 12:05:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill Paul <wpaul> To: hasty@rah.star-gate.com (Amancio Hasty) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dell 8) Message-ID: <199806091905.MAA11228@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <199806090843.BAA07955@rah.star-gate.com> from Amancio Hasty at "Jun 9, 98 01:43:27 am"
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> > Apparently, Dell is allowing customers to buy a PC without Windows 8) > > In my opinion this is a good thing if you are planning to use Windows. > > Amancio > How did you determine this? My impression is that they always let you buy machines without Lose95/LoseNT, but only if you place the order by phone and explicitly instruct the salesdroid not to include it with the purchase, not if you try to buy something off their 'online store' on their web server. Go to www.dell.com, select their online store, then choose a system type at random and try to customize it. Scroll down to the 'Operating System' selection and check the choices they offer. Out of all the systems they list, I think only the Dell PowerEdge server line allow you to select an operating system choise of 'None.' All of the desktop machines offer you choices, but they're all M$ ones. I think that at one point you could select 'No operating system' as an OS choice, but that doesn't seem to be the case now. If Dell or Gateway or Compaq or other vendors really want to play fair, they'd do the following: 1) Allow you to choose not to order any Micro$oft OS or applications software _at_ _all_ when ordering a system, regardless of the type (desktop, server, whatever), or where the order is being placed (direct phone order or online web server). The fact that a system can be purchased without an OS should also be prominently displayed in printed or online product catalogs (many people end up buying and using Lose95 or LoseNT because they think it's the only thing available, and nobody bothers to tell them otherwise. 2) Deduct the cost of all M$ software licenses from the purchase price of the machine. If you look at Dell's online store, you'll see that if you take a machine that's configured with LoseNT or LoseNT server by default and make another OS selection, the price of the system drops. (It seems now that asking for LoseNT workstation adds about $84 to the price, versus a couple hundred dollars for LoseNT server.) However, the one time I located a Dell OptiPlex desktop configuration that allowed you to choose 'No Operating System,' I noticed that the total price of the system did not go down when I told it not to include Lose95 in the configuration. There are only a couple of ways this could happen. One possibility is that M$ is selling Lose95 licenses to companies like Dell so cheaply that Dell can simply afford to eat the cost and not bother charging customers extra whether they ask for Lose95 or not. The other possibility, which is far more likely, is that Dell is paying for the licenses in bulk and is increasing the cost of all their machines to subsidize the purchase of the licenses from M$. What this means is that customers that _don't_ buy Lose95 end up subsidizing the cost of Lose95 licenses anyway. When I buy a machine, I want to pay for the hardware that I ordered: I don't want to pay for somebody elses' Lose95 license. 3) When a customer says he doesn't want to buy Lose95 or LoseNT with a computer, the vendor is not allowed to add a Lose95 or LoseNT license sale to his books. What I'm getting at here has to do with how M$ adds up their sales figures. Basically, one of the arguments Micro$oft loves to use when trying to convince people to switch to Lose95 or LoseNT is that their software is so popular because they've sold so many units. The problem is that many of the Lose95 licenses that M$ sells are actually sold to computer vendors like Dell or Gateway or Compaq. If Dell buys X amount of Lose95 licenses for a bulk fee, they have to try and defray the cost somehow, which, as I noted in my last point, they do by jacking up the average cost of all their machines. This means that even if I explicitly ask a Dell salesdroid not to include Lose95 with a machine that I buy, and even if they ship me a machine with a blank hard disk and no OS media, I may _still_ end up contributing to M$'s total number of Lose95 licenses sold. Again, no sale means no sale. One problem here is that if Dell or whoever buys, say, 10000 Lose95 licenses, M$ gets to say that they shipped 10000 Lose95 licenses whether Dell sells them or not. This artificially inflates the 'popularity' of Lose95, which M$ then uses as a selling point. (Remember M$ doesn't care how many physical copies of the Lose95 media they sell: it's the licenses that are important.) 4) Computers and boxes shipped without any M$ software should not be festooned with "Designed for Micro$oft Lose95" stickers. If I'm not paying to use M$ software, I'm not paying to advertise it either. (I still don't know why they put these stickers on monitors.) 5) Computer vendors should not create systems that are dependent on Lose95 or LoseNT to operate correctly. I'm pretty sure that Dell hasn't ever done this, but I think Compaq has; I've heard stories about hardware that required a special initialization that could only be done via an MS-DOG or Lose95 program. Naturally, both the hardware and the programs were proprietary. This also applies to peripherals and device drivers: third party hardware vendors that only provide device driver support for Lose95 or LoseNT and don't disclose device programming information without an NDA or large licensing fee really need to have their attitudes adjusted. Anyway: if Dell really has decided to allow customers to buy _any_ of their machines (desktop, server or laptop) without Lose95, and has tried to do at least some of what I've said above, then I'd like to hear more about it. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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