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Dell No Longer Selling Systems w/o Microsoft OS
UPDATES
1. Effective 8/26 - New Microsoft contract rules stipulate that we can no longer offer the "NO OS" option to our customers beyond September 1st. As such all customers currently purchasing a "NO OS" option on either OptiPlex, Precison or Latitude for the express purpose of loading a non-MS OS will have the following options:
1. Purchase a Microsoft OS with each OptiPlex, Precision or Latitude system.
2. For OptiPlex and Precision - purchase one of the new "nSeries" products (offered for GX260, WS340 & WS530 - details in the attached FAQ) that are being created to address a different OS support requirement other than a current standard Microsoft OS.
We must have all "No OS" orders shipped out of the factory by September 1st. The "No OS" legend code and SKUs will be I-coded on 8/19 and D-coded on August 26th to ensure shipment of orders prior to September 1st. FYI - this effects all of our competitors as well.
M$ has always been brash...I think it's this type of charging at the US government that has always kept them off-kilter. That, and their large portion of the US economy has made the Government skittish about confronting their obviously Monopolistic tactics.
All it's going to take is a young Attorney with the lack of political awareness to tell the Emperor that he has no clothes.
So let's toast to the young an Naive. Personally, in a world where M$ can do this, I think drunk is a preferred state.
Going Boldy where I surely don't belong,
JoeLinux
Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet plane engines.
The second the computer hardware industry gets over it's undying need to profit and destroy its competitors, it can finally do something about Microsoft. If they were all to tell MS at the same time "Hey, guess what, we're going to dictate the terms of what OS goes on our machines now", then MS would be up a creek without a paddle. Unfortunately, the likelihood of this happening is slim to nil, the second a large comp manufacturer did this, the others would go the other way and run to MS saying "Look at what CompStore2002 is doing! We won't do that, give us a break on the licensing!"
Microsoft is using the greed of the industry against itself. Without hardware to run it on, software is useless, and Microsoft is useless. They are in a far more precarious position then they let on...Maybe it's time to give them a little scare
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Seriously, before we go off on a big spree about how Microsoft is bad and all that, let's keep in mind that Dell could have fought the licensing in court if they really wanted to. They could have used the precedent of Microsoft as a monopoly to tell them to fsck off. Microsoft could have tried to "punish" them, and Dell could have beat them down even further. There is/was a perfect chance to fight against the monopoly, but Dell just turned over and gave up.
Yes we're all QUITE aware of how evil M$ is. I could rant about that for days, but here on Slashdot it's preaching to the choir. What I see here is a company (Dell) basically enabling that evil to thrive. Wanna boycott something? Boycott Dell and make them realize they should have fought back.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Even if this is legit, is it really that big of a deal? Most Linux users know enough to ignore the "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell" dude, and build their own systems anyway.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Between the way various article postings lately are all but Slashddot-sanctioned trolls (EU-only internet, anyone?), the fact that I don't think even Microsoft is so stupid as to try something like that when Judge Kolar-Kotelly hasn't signed off on anything one way or the other (Ballmer wouldn't want to find himself in a cell for contempt of court), and the story comes from "some sysadmin" whose "e-mail address" is in the Hotmail domain...
Well, let's just say I'll believe this story once it's verified by a third party.
There are two problems with that:
1. Microsoft is pushing that having a computer with an OS other that installed on it is illegal (especially when they are donated to schools.)
2. More imporantly, Microsoft gets paid for every computer that sells with their OS. If you buy with theirs and remove it, you just gave MS your money for no reason.
~ kjrose
What they mean is that they are going to go from offering "hardware A, available as model B, with option C" to "hardware A available as model D which is available only with option C"
Bascially, the contract with MS says that they can't get the OEM price unless they sell the model in question with only MS products. So, they have to create another "model" which they ship without an OS. The obfuscation in the letter is designed to avoid outright saying that they're using the word of the contract against MS, so that MS can't say in court that Dell violated the contract in spirit (I'm not sure how defensible that would be, but if I were Dell, I'd avoid it too).
Dell is the #1 or #2 PC supplier in the world. They have a tremendous amount of power with all of their suppliers. If they really didn't want to agree to this they didn't have to. They simply could have said NO and Microsoft would have changed their agreement. They don't want to risk another PC vendor promoting and improving Linux like IBM has done.
If Dell agreed to this it is because they didn't believe the fight was worth it. They have made a lot of statements to the fact that they aren't making any money off Linux sales so it makes sense that they would choose to do this.
If the Linux community wants the big PC vendors to start supporting Linux and making agreements that don't harm the Linux community they need to start making it apparent to Dell. The next time your company is looking to upgrade its desktops contact Dell and request a quote for their standard business desktop with Linux preinstalled. When they point out that only certain systems are available inform them that you know for fact that Redhat/Mandrake/Debian/Etc. installs perfectly on the Optiplex you want and that you will be taking your business to another PC vendor that supports MS. If Dell wants your business they will meet your needs, and their policies towards restrictive Microsoft licenses will change.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
They didn't even get a slap on the wrist for this behavior.
Read the court's findings of fact. The court decided this behavior was an "anti-piracy" measure--not the anti-competition measure it really was.
I see lots of angry condemations here - but this is actually very typical price negotiation. Microsoft didn't go to Dell and tell them they couldn't sell PCs with other OSes or they wouldn't sell them Windows any more. Microsoft went to Dell and offered them huge discounts to Windows if they signed an exclusive offer. Dell saw the dollar signs and agreed.
Dell has done a pretty good job with their letter blaming MS...but MS would be ignoring basic business practices if it didn't offer and option like this. I'm sure Dell is happy with the deal and laughing all the way to the bank.
Lets say that Firestone tells Ford that if they want Firestone's high performance special tire for a new Ford hot rod (only made by Firestone) Ford has to outfit their entire product line with Firestones. It's an all or nothing deal. What happens then? Bridgestone, Cooper, and all the other manufacturers sue. They'd probably win too. How come that doesn't work here? This just plain sucks.
Imagine the same action taken by a large publisher in the bookselling industry.
Barnes and Noble: "Our contract with HarperCollins stipulates we can no longer sell blank journals or college ruled notebooks. Customers will have the following options:
1. Purchase a book published by HarperCollins.
2. Purchase a book published by another publisher.
HarperCollins demanded this because we all know people don't use blank paper to write their own stories or notes, but to pirate their intellectual property.
FYI-This affects all our competitors as well."
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Microsoft is just not comfortable with no OS installed, which means that the user will have to 'find' an OS, that might just be Windows.
There's a bit more to it that that. What this means is that Dell can no longer offer a Model installed with Windows and a non microsoft OS. If Model A comes with OEM windows, Model A cannot be offered as Model A with any other OS. If Dell wish to offer Model A with, say, RedHat Linux, they'll have to brand it as another Model.
This kills dual bootable options and forces suppliers to offer confusing product lines. Imagine the extra money this will take up in Advertising and Admin costs. At the end of the day, some OEMs will find it cheaper to sell only Windows offerings.
Microsoft does not hold it's market share purely because of its bad business practices. Windows is very easy to install, device drivers are easy to manage, you can change display modes with a mouse click, etc...
:)
Maybe not, but they certainly built their market share purely on bad business practices. (OK, originally they gained market share because people pirated the hell out of their BASIC interpreters..)
All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place.. or have we forgotten 95 already? Hell, by the time 3.1 was out, 'Windows' was pretty much synonymous with 'computer' for a lot of people. And you can't tell me that drivers or video modes were anything approaching easy back then
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Look, I'm not some fanatical Linux Zealot on the fringes of society. I'm a programmer, system administrator, IT manager, whatever you want to call it. I use Linux and other free OSs, and I really hate being treated like some psycho zealot on the fringe when I try to avoid doubly (and sometimes triply) licensing microsoft software for Clients' PCs. ("You want what? We don't do that? Whats a EULA?" HP, Compaq, Gateway and now Dell. its all the same.) I mean, honestly, where is my FTC? Where is my consumer protection? It goes beyond frustrating.
Wendell
I recently took up a job in a College in the UK. As part of the Summer upgrade schedule, I have to purchase about 30 new PCs, with operating system and Office software. The plan was to move the OS (W2K) from the old systems to the new, which I thought would be OK because the OS was purchased separately from the PCs themselves.
When I told this to the PC supplier's rep, he became very, very agitated -- to the point that he seemed so rude I nearly told him to leave. He said we couldn't move the OS from one system to another, and (furthermore) they wouldn't sell PCs without a version of Windows on them.
I checked this on a sys admin mailing list I subscribe to. He was right: MS sued a company for supplying OS-less PCs, and could have bankrupted them with the court judgement (UKP100,000 fine). That's why the rep became so agitated: he didn't want the same fate for his company.
I don't know which aspects of the law come into play here, or which part of the EULA fine-print, but at the moment I'm looking for ways to increase the use of Linux and may be able to persuade some of our users to use it. In the end, this might work in favour of alternative operating systems: contrary to what M$ seem to believe, many of their customers do not have unlimited funds and will seek alternatives.
To illustrate the monopoly issue here, what would actually happen is this. Firestone would tell Ford that they have to outfit everything with firestone tires. Then Ford would put out a bid to the other manufacturers to provide a replacement for Firestone's tire. One of them would undercut Firestone, if for no other reason, than to keep them from taking over Ford's tires, and that'd be that. This is what happens in a competitive market, unlike what we see in the O/S market.
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Actually MS fraud would be more like their statement that their OSDN kits contain the complete Win32 API and that there are no secret API calls reserved for MS developers. That's an actual material fraud made over the course of several years and has changed the course of computing.
A lot of people believed in that promise and it gave MS the largest ISV community on the planet. And it was all built on a lie, one that MS now claims it never made.
What completely blows me away is that all the anti-MS people can't get their act together enough to document it and bring a class-action lawsuit based on it.
Despite all the rhetoric coming out of our government about how horrible this is and how we need a return of ethic to corporations, I'll be very surprised if anything really changes in the long run. The only real change I expect to see is stock holders will change the rules for their CEO's because it isn't in their long term best interest for a CEO to over-inflate his options and bail out.
But as far as ethics in business go, there is only one ethic: make money. The system is set up to encourage a company to find the shortest path to greatest profitability, and that's the way it will likely always be. Is this bad? Depends on what you want companies to accomplish. If you want them to achieve economic growth, increasing efficiency, etc, then they are ideally groomed to do this (as our economy has demonstrated over the past decades). But don't expect any higher moral sense to come out of a company unless there is a profit motive behind it. It can happen, but the system isn't designed to encourage it.
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All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place..
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
"Your honor, the basis of our complaint is that MS used dirty tricks to get everyone to buy their stuff, and now the underhanded bastards are working to maintain market share by pleasing their customers! C'mon, make 'em stop!"
The only bad business practices MS used to establish their monopoly were the artificial incompatibility with PC-DOS, and the way they dumped OS/2 like a poisoned turd in favor of the win32 API (both detailed at this page).
But, IBM was still shipping OS/2; were the enhanced features of windows 95 perhaps offered to compete with the only genuine alternative at the time?
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
It's called "maintaining a revenue stream". Microsoft has no choice but to continually enhance their product, competition or no, or else people will no longer buy upgrades every few years. No new revenue == pissed off shareholders.
Of course, when they can't come up with any good ideas, they just break compatibility. Try using ANY Office document made with a new version on an older version. I'm sorry, but there's no technical reason at all why an Excel spreadsheet made under XP can't be opened in Office97. Just leave whatever miniscule new features that exist from being used. However, they don't do this. And as all new PCs come with OfficeXP, when you replace some of your office machines, guess what? You have to then go and upgrade ALL of your Office versions, at several hundred dollars a pop. For what benefit? I haven't seen any signifigant improvement in the Office suite since at least 4.2. I still word process the same way, and do spreadsheets the same way.
Fact of the matter is, Microsoft uses their monopoly position to force you to buy new software every few years, unless you're in the unlikely position of being able to keep every single one of your old machines doing what you want them to do, forever. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with adding new features.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I thought one of the stipulations of their settlement with the DOJ was that they wouldn't do that sort of thing any more.
The funny part is, that MS want's us to sell PCs with operating system and customers wants to get PCs without a preinstalled OS.
My firm is solving this thing by just adding a SuSE-Live-Eval CD to any PC that is delivered with an empty hard disk. So the customer is fine since he doesn't have to pay extra "MS taxes" and MS can't complain since we are shipping every PC with an operating system.
(so you can literally remove a hard drive from one computer and place it in another and BeOS won't give two shits),
:P With hotswappable drives, HDs can be hotswapped to.
Assuming power down first? Windows doesn't care either.
Its windows, yet it sucks in many areas, but give credit where credit is do, Windows (or DOS for that matter) has never had problems with whatever drives you want to shove in there.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Dell makes great stuff, but hardly worth the price it fetches.
I just slapped together a dual p4 xeon2.0ghz system for 2500. It has a gig of rambus, 80 gighd, DVD burner and a gforce4ti4200 something a rather.
Dell only offered Xeons in the p3 flavor, similiar setup for around 800 dollars more.
I used to be a sysadmin, I know all the service benefits dell gives (pre-imaged systems, 24hr on-site part replacement, ect) but I think if you compare the cost a network being admin'ed by dell with a sysadmin who just "makes calls to dell" all day to the cost of a network being admin'd by a sysadmin who maintains an inventory of spare parts, uses ghost or NT2k Remote installation services, and buys his/her parts from a local screwdriver shop I really do think you would see a huge difference.
Parts don't really break that often, windows does. Especially outlook. Is there really a savings to pay for that dell "protection money"?
If you're currently a sysadmin in charge of some large corporate network, speak with your dollars, not with your slashdot. Try and talk your company into standardizing on a single platform. Here let me spec out a good standard...
Nvidia video (single unified driver = less driver headaches)
Creative sound (the standard by which all follow)
3com networking
Other than the motherboards changing over the next few years you won't really need to do a lot of work to maintain these machines over the next few years. Be smart, implement home directories and tell everyone to put whatever they want backed up in there. That way you can wipe their machines without hassle.
well, thats my 0.02. Wish I had caught the article sooner.
BeOS didn't take off because the software wasn't there. Unless you were writing your own interactive graphics utilities, there was no reason to use it.
Restaurants typically sell only one soft-drink vendor line, such as Pepsi vs. Coke, in order to get the best pricing/terms on the deal. In part it's the volume that does this (if they sold both, each would sell at half the level, and they wouldn't get the biggest price break), and the salesman push to get an exclusive deal (he gets more commission).
That doesn't hold for all establishments though. My local 7-11 has fountains for both Pepsi and Coke products (though nicely segregated). I guess for them the increased business and "goodwill" from having both sets of products outweighs the cost-savings of signing to an exclusive deal.
Perhaps something for PC suppliers to take note of.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
BeOS didn't have software, because Microsoft threatened to yank windows licenses completely from any OEM that dared sell a BeOS system.
Your argument is beyond the pale of retarded. BeOS had enough default software to let a non-power user enjoy it and find it usable. Especially since they wouldn't have to endure another BSOD ever again.
And after a few non-power users have BeOS, you'd find that alot of ISV's would start porting to it, which would be bad for, you guessed it...
Micro$oft.
I like linux because it doesn't crash and it's the best system to run the internet on.
I like windows because there are better games.
I like mac because there are better audio/art applications.
i have 3 computers.
BIOTCH
The issue is not so much what you desire, but what you are willing to do to get it. There's nothing wrong with working hard and getting "stuff" (where stuff is money or regard or political clout or whatever coin interests you). There IS something wrong with hurting other people in order to get "stuff", and that's what capitalism has so far failed to address.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
> Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already
> established. How much sense does that make?
Well, suppose you are a monopoly - and near-as-dammit 100% of computers have your
software installed.
How do you stay in business when 100% of your customer base already owns
what you are selling them?
1) You add features - make it easier to use - so people will pay to upgrade.
2) You ban people from using the software they own on their next computer
by writing things like WinXP that physically prevent that.
3) You stop people from installing the software they already own on their
next computer by preventing people like Dell from selling computers
without another copy of the OS on them.
Microsoft are doing all three of those things...Duh.
Windoze version N *does* have competition - but that competition is
Windoze version N-1 and that's not helping the monopoly situation.
www.sjbaker.org
There is another reason not to have an OEM license. My sony laptop came with Win ME, but it is setup so it will only install on this particular computer, not on any other. The day I sell/trash my laptop the OEM license will be useless - I will have to pay for a new license again.
Despite such practices Linux is upcoing, at least in Wal*Mart. Microsoft is not the only reason of its own monopoly. Companies like Dell help a lot. Even potential competitors. AOL for a while kept Netscape killed and delivered AOL clients with IE. IBM only recently started to support Linux. Sun released JDK for Windows in much better quality than for Linux. Apple for awhile ignored Linux.