Slashdot Mirror
Is There An OS On My Hard Drive?
stm2 writes "Thanks to an agreement between Lindows and Seagate, from October you will be able to choose a hard drive with or without Lindows. Michael Robertson, in his usual marketing speak, compares this to adding "Fluoride in the water", because now you get for free something you used to need to go after (people used to go to dentist to get their Fluoride). According to the PR, the OS can autodetect and configure itself on the host machine."
There is a big chunk of people out there who aren't afraid to open up their own machines, but use Windows because they don't have enough Round Tuits to try Linux.
If Lindows is easy enough to give a go it might last for a few days before being scrubbed (doesn't play game X)... but then the idea that Linux systems can do things pretty well will stick in the back of the mind for the next time they have to assemble a 'second machine' for general use in the house.
Beep beep.
These are the tactics that we accused Microsoft of when they were trying to push other browsers like Netscape and other OSes like Linux out of the market. I'm pretty convinced they work.
:-) I'm a lazy guy!
Give people for free the stuff that you want them to at least try once. They they have to DO THINGS to get rid of it or change it. People are lazy, so at least some won't.
As to where will this end up? Well the small white-box assembly shops might be tempted to use the Lindows install on the drive to burn-in the computer. And leave it on if the customer didn't order a MicroSoft install. So the end users might end up seeing it. Great.
Some people buy a new HD, and will install it as the first drive, move the old one over. Bingo!
I installed two machines last week. They came with Seagate drives. Had a Debian based installation already been present, I'd just have upgraded that.