Microsoft Laptop Recipient Auctioning Laptop

Salvance writes "While most bloggers who received the controversial Vista powered Acer from Microsoft are keeping them, Laughing Squid has decided to auction off his free laptop from Microsoft and donate all proceeds to the The Electronic Frontier Foundation. (EFF) He saw this as a great opportunity to support a worthy cause, and some other bloggers are following suit. What's funny is that Microsoft is now backpedaling and telling bloggers to send back the laptops. Do they even have a legal right to do so?"

Comments

huh

[Swimport]

For the price of these laptops they could have sent out complimentary Vista discs to thousands of these so called influential people.

Re:huh

[dominique_cimafranca]

Given Vista's steep hardware requirements, I doubt if just sending out CDs would have done much good.

Re:huh

[mrchaotica]

If Microsoft wasn't so bent on keeping everything proprietary, there really would only be the cost of the media. Look, for instance, at organizations like Debian -- you don't see them paying for "key management," now do you?

Re:huh

[kripkenstein]

Um, i think what you mean is that for the price of ONE of these laptops, they could send out vista discs to thousands of influential people. You do realize their ONLY production cost when giving out freebies on vista is the cost to press a dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on.

No, that's not true... think of the loss of potential revenue. Those people would have paid $300 or so per copy, which is money out of M$'s pocket... food off of their plate... money that rightfully belongs to them. Just like when you pirate a movie - regardless of whether you would have seen it legally or not - that's money that the MPAA immediately feel the loss of, when they can't afford to send their kids to college anymore.

("dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on" - it's a DVD. It has to be, since all Vista DVDs have both 32 and 64-bit versions on them, as well as all the functionality of 'Vista Ultimate', which you need to pay more for to 'unlock'. So you see, the additional 'Ultimate' functionality is already on the DVD, but if you don't pay extra for it, you are taking money off of Microsoft's plate... food out of their pocket... um... or something)

Re:huh

[node 3]

That's like saying if it weren't for car thieves necessitating keys and alarm systems, then the price of cars would only be the cost of the materials that go into it.

It's possible to steal a car (and it happens quite often). It's impossible to steal Windows (and has never happened, ever).

Unless you simply mean stealing the physical disc, which the key doesn't really do much to prevent.

Copyright infringement != theft.

Re:huh

[kasperd]

That's like saying if it weren't for car thieves necessitating keys and alarm systems, then the price of cars would only be the cost of the materials that go into it.

If I was going to buy a car, it would be in my best interest to have a good lock on the car. If I was going to buy an operating system, it would not be in my best interest to have loads of artificial restrictions in the operating system.

Re:huh

[Aim Here]

Economics lesson.

The COST of cars is the price of the materials that go into it, plus the cost of the labour required to make and of the resources required to move it to where it is to be sold. There's also a single one-off fixed cost to begin with that relates to the factory the car is built in, plus the cost of designing the car, plus some other small sundries. Those one-off costs become less and less important, the more cars you sell.

The price is the cost plus the profit.

Now with a copy of some piece of software, the price of the materials, the labour required to make it, and the resources required to move it is either the cost of the box and the media it comes on (i.e. very cheap) or the price of letting the internet distribute it (i.e. more or less free). There's still a one-off fixed cost, which is the cost of writing it in the first place, but that becomes less and less important as time goes on, just like the cars. Besides, it's eminently possible to get those fixed costs taken care of for more or less nothing too. Linux does it. GNU does it. (Free|Open|Net)BSD does it. You get the picture. The reason that they're generally free (as in beer) and Windows isn't is precisely because they've relaxed the need to cover the fixed costs (and, of course, curbed Linus' immense lust for profit and power) by using copyright law to proprietarise software.

Price again, is cost + profit. In this case, with the proprietary locks on, the profit margin is immense, because the marginal cost of what Microsoft sells is next to nothing, and that is why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world.

Your particular analogy is broken because a) you confuse cost with price and b) ten cars costs roughly ten times as much to make (given the initial investment in making a car factory) as one car, whereas ten copies of windows costs roughly the same to make as one copy of windows (barring the fixed costs, again). The price of both cars and software is cost + profit; however with software, the cost is next to 0, and the profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'.

Hope this helps.

Re:huh

[arkanes]

Without a *prior* contract in place, anything anyone sends to you in the mail is yours, free and clear. This is due to an old mail fraud scam, where you'd send someone magazines, or books, or whatever, and then bill them for services rendered. Shrinkwrap licenses don't work (because courts and lawmakers actually gave a shit about that kind of deceptive marketing 100 years ago). So if Microsoft sent people a laptop, if they didn't have a contract *before they sent it*, then they just gave away laptops. That's why the Microsoft letter says "give away or return", and that's why it's just spin anyway. Corporations don't give stuff like this away "just for fun". You can bet that it's entered on a balance sheet as "goodwill" somewhere. But you aren't supposed to be so obvious or extravagant with your bribes, so they're taking heat and they're trying to spin out of it.

Re:Can they ask for them back? Yes.

[Timesprout]

Well given that Microsoft clearly said they could be sent back or given away when they gave them out initally of course they can. Also Microsoft have not asked for the latops back. They asked that they be given away or returned to them when reviewed, very big difference.

Re:They hate M$...

[pandrijeczko]

Actually, his point is well made because Slashdot is already infested with far too many fanboys who seem to forget that Apple is out to make just as much money as Microsoft wants to.

And the sooner these fashion followers/brand junkies start making informed decisions about what to spend their money on then the better it will be for the rest of us - because then these corporations need to start creating good, value for money products rather than something with a pretty logo on it.

And as for your post, sitting there in your anonymous little dark cupboard ready to just throw abuse at anyone who posts something you don't personally like (perhaps you're a fanboy yourself?) is trollish behaviour if ever I saw it.

Re:This article needs to be changed.

[db32]

Unfortunately that tends to be "We are going to lose, but don't know it" speak. I wonder how many politicians have been elected on the platform of "We don't have to lie because we are better" great...and you also aren't elected so your policy of not lying really means about squat because the guy who is telling all the lies is the 'decider'. Not that I really advocate lying here, just playing devil's advocate a bit.

Re:unconcious bias

[Gregory Cox]

But there are other benefits to Microsoft besides unintentional bias.

Just having enough influential bloggers get used to using Vista and writing about it may well help to increase its popularity by word of mouth (assuming it's not actually dramatically worse than XP). This is the "first hit is free" or "cinema preview" effect.

Letting bloggers who are likely to try Vista use a super-fast PC to give them the best possible user experience is also likely to cut down on negative comments.

At this stage, when Vista adoption rates are not yet decided, Microsoft would be happy to give away Vista machines or even pay people to take them. But that looks too much like bribery, which is bad PR, and it looks like they backtracked because they realised that.

In retrospect, they probably should have only sent out review copies and asked for them to be sent back, to get the positive effects of publicity without the accusations that they were trying to buy good reviews.

Re:This article needs to be changed.

[eeyoredragon]

Thank you... I hear this all the time in political/religious discussions. "Well, X side spreads so many lies, we're at a disadvantage, so if we exaggerate from time to time, it's ok because it balances out!"

Balances out? How about instead of the world coming down to their side or your side, it comes down to what's true and what isn't true?? And if so, how is putting out even more false information balancing anything out?

And if that isn't working... quite frankly, if you're the underdog, participating in falsifying information is especially risky from a pragmatic point of view. Why break the status quo to adopt the thinking of someone you've caught repeatedly lying/exaggerating to you? Cynicism and the idea that you can't trust any side generally seems to eventually beat people down into just accepting the status quo: which is not you.

Re:This article needs to be changed.

[Orange Crush]

I thought that the open-source community was suposed to be better.. There are no fan-boy-fanatics, (RMS aside)

Every community has its fanatics. It just comes with the territory when dealing with people. Whether it's a religious, political, social or technological faction; there are foaming-at-the-mouth busybodies with agendas and megaphones and there are reasonable rational participants. In most cases, the fanatics are only a tiny minority. They're just a lot louder.

Your analysis is faulty

[MarkusQ]

If your goal is to spread truth (e.g. if the main reason you oppose X is that it is based on / spread by lies) you may find yourself faced with just the sort of decision you describe. But you have mischaracterized the alternatives. Your actual options are:

1. Continue to insist on the truth, even though your opponent's lies may give them an edge and thus you might lose.
2. Start lying as well, in which case you automatically lose.

Remember, winning the battle is a means to an end. If you do something to "win" the battle that prevents you from obtaining your ultimate goal, it does your cause more harm than good.

--MarkusQ