Falling Hardware Prices Favor Linux

An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting arguing that, as hardware prices fall below $250 for laptops and desktops, Linux should gain as the Microsoft tax stands out in sharper relief. "In previous years, if you were spending US$1500 and up on a laptop, the Microsoft tax you were paying didn't seem like such a big deal. XP or Vista was pre-installed, fairly convenient... But as the price of hardware for small basic machines comes down, (think under US$250 by the end of next year), then software price starts to become a big issue. Why would you pay the price of your new laptop again just for the software, when all you want to do is really basic things?"

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Re:MS Tax?

[JonJ]

But for everyone that doesn't want Windows, it is indeed a tax.

Look for a price drop

[dokebi]

MS isn't stupid. If linux begins to seriously cannibalizing their market, they will simply reduce Windows OS price to 50-100USD, with even bigger academic discounts. That would cut into their profits, but it'll keep people happy and maintain their OS dominance.

A Windows license is not that expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes the assumption that Microsoft cannot drop the price of Windows. They have lots of side products and the cash to drive a price war for a long time. I think Microsoft charges oems maybe $30 for installing windows. That may sound like a lot but then then people spend $5 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks

Nope

[noewun]

Add this to the list of things which should make Linux gain marketshare. Off the top of my head, the list includes: Microsoft's problems with XP/Vista, Apple's problems with 10.4/10.5, Apple's switch to Intel, the latest Windows virus, the introduction of the iPhone, the introduction of the iTMS, the fact that Balmer is a sweaty ape, and on and on.

The reason that Linux is, and will remain a niche player in the OS desktop market have almost next to nothing to do with technology. I think many posters here have at least a minimum familiarity with Linux, at least enough to know that a well-maintained Linux system can easily do all of the things more normal computer buyers need. It can check email, surf the web, handle digital pictures, play music, load music onto iPods, balance checkbook and find porn. The problem for Linux is that Windows and OS X can do all these things as well. Given this, there's no reason for an average consumer to switch.

What about hardware lock in? What about free, as in speech and beer?

No one cares.

I will repeat that: the average consumer doesn't care about either one. Most consumers already hold themselves in a sort of vendor lock in. If they've had a good experience buying from Dell, odds are they will continue to buy from Dell. If they've had good luck with Macs their entire computing lives, odds are they will stay there. And it's not just with computers. We all know people who will only by Hondas, or Fords, or Black & Decker or Bose. This isn't a technology issue, it's a marketing and consumer loyalty issue, and no amount of fancy kernel engineering will change that. It's the same for free speech and beer: your average consumer doesn't see the cost of the OS, because s/he buys one with the computer. My brother ran the OS his Powerbook came with (10.2.8) for years. He only accidently upgraded to 10.4 because he brought his machine to me to fix an unrelated problem, and I said something like, "Holy shit, you're still running 10.2.8." It was all the same to him, and I'm not sure he noticed the difference between 10.2 and 10.4. I'm sure he will be running whatever version of 10.4 his MacBook Pro came with until the next time he sees me.

Re:Nope

[noewun]

No. No.

And no.

I know there's a general bias against marketing on Slashdot. Hell, even I think it's bullshit 50% of the time. But marketing--real, well done marketing, like Apple does--is a very difficult thing, and it's something which very few companies in any industry do well. Some companies do it well and poorly at the same time. Most of Microsoft's market is for shit, but their XBox division does it very well (at least in the U.S. They suck at it in Japan.)

Fr'example, let's look at the iPod versus the Zune. Apple's iPod marketing is very focused and seemingly very simple. It has one, overriding message: the iPod is music. Not 'the iPod can help you manage your music collection'. Not 'the iPod makes your music sound better'. Not even 'you can share your music with your friends with the iPod'. Simply, 'the iPod is music'. And because the iPod's product design backs this up, it's an enormously successful product because the whole thing is designed to make managing your music collection and using the device as simple as possible. There are no extraneous features, and none advertised. You aren't told what you can do with your music, or how to handle it, or how many in formats you can listen to it. You are simpye told, 'this is music.' You plug it into your machine. It grabs your playlists. You press play.

Now, let's look at the Zune, if you can find one. It wasn't sold as an mp3 player: it was sold as some weird cross between a music player and a social networking device. The message wasn't 'this thing is music'. The message was. . .

. . .well, there was no message. There wasn't a coherent narrative, or a center of focus. There was just 'here's this thing which will do stuff. With music. Buy it. . .'

Linux has no narrative an average computer user will care about.

A timely subject!

[rindeee]

I was just having a conversation with a buddy of mine about this subject this afternoon. Rather than desktop/laptop prices though, our talk centered around servers. I was pricing Dell blade servers today. Do you know you can get a blade chassis with 10 blades 'loaded to the gills' for around $60K? Now granted, that may not be small potatoes, but for the horsepower involved (each blade has dual 3GHz Quad cores with 16GB RAM and dual 146GB drives) it's peanuts. My use revolves around one use and one use only...Xen on CentOS. That $60k is a lot of jack to the average /.er, but compared to what I would have had to (and did) settle for a couple of years ago, it's practically free. Man, what a great time to be in this industry. The more commoditized (yeah, I realize that probably isn't even a slang term) hardware becomes, the better for me/us/anyone using FOSS solutions. Love it! Love it! Love it!!!

Not so fast...!

[bogaboga]

But as the price of hardware for small basic machines comes down, (think under US$250 by the end of next year), then software price starts to become a big issue. Why would you pay the price of your new laptop again just for the software, when all you want to do is really basic things?"

Unless Linux vendors produce what people want, there will not be that much anticipated uptake at all.

If one has to download and configure not less that 4 pieces of software just to get a basic mail-server functional, using the command line and editing text files which can be prone to errors...

If one has to put up with slow loading software (read OpenOffice.org) running on ugly interfaces that sometimes look incomplete (read KDE and GNOME), then we in the Linux world will wait a long time to get noticed especially on the desktop.

But it's getting better on the server front. The Apache web server for example does not require that many add ons [if any], to get it fully functional, and the upcoming release of KDE looks very promising.

On the GNOME front, I am not impressed by its inability to do basic file operations in the file dialog.

Those that argue that this functionality should be restricted to the file manager have never explained why one can still create a directory/folder within this same file dialog. With their argument, it should be removed. Period.

Yes, and I know why it didn't work out that way

[ESR]

That's right, I did make this claim.

And I know why the effect didn't bite. It's because the big OEMs get their cost of Windows installation offset by the fees that crapware manufacturers play to get their demo versions and adware and spyware bundled into the distro. For an outfit like Dell, those fees are probably large enough to make installing Windows a net profit generator.

This would also explain why Linux configurations generally cost more that Windows configurations with identical hardware. It's not conspiracy, they're just trying to maintain margin in the absence of the crapware fees.

everyone is a techie if it means free stuff

[acidrain]

The whole "people don't care about what technology they are using" argument fails the moment users realize they can get free stuff. For example the mainstream adoption of bittorent to download movies. All of a sudden everyone knows how it works and where to look for torrents etc.

And when Linux means that their laptop costs 1/2 as much, all of a sudden everyone will be recommending packages out of Ubuntu.

The one flaw with this whole thing is that it is absurd to think that Microsoft would blindly price themselves out of the market. Microsoft will sell XP for the next 10 years at $15 a pop if that is what they have to do to stay dominant. They charge $100/machine only because the market will bear it.

Re:Frist!

[digitig]

As someone seriously considering buying Asus's eeepc (awful name), I have to agree with the main point of this article with regard to costs. Well, sort of. Unfortunately, the lowest priced hardware tends to be the hardest to get working with Linux. Sure, I know the RA points out that most of the machines can run some sort of Linux, but there's a difference between running Linux and having all peripherals supported. I've spent a few weeks trying to get WiFi working under Feisty Faun on my desktop, with no success: native support doesn't work and I can't get ndiswrapper to recognise it. No, I'm not a Linux guru, nor a networking guru, but nor are 99.9% of the customers for that cheap hardware (the gurus are going to want some serious metal, after all!) so the pain of getting Linux working properly is likely to outweigh the Microsoft tax. To get FF working on my desktop I'd probably have to buy paid support (I've already tried asking in the forums), which would likely cost more than an OEM copy of Vista (which I could now upgrade to XP, it seems). Sorry, I wish it were otherwise, but Linux is still experts only, and I can't see cheap hardware changing that.

Double-edged Sword

[DJ_Perl]

Not so fast! When hardware prices are high, it makes sense to use GNU/Linux or BSD on barebones legacy hardware. Falling hardware prices means that it is cheaper to feed Vista's gluttonous hardware requirements.

Re: OEM Windows or OEM Linux

[Mansing]

"Unfortunately, the lowest priced hardware tends to be the hardest to get working with Linux."

This is also true of Windows. For those who have tried to get a Toshiba laptop functioning properly using a boxed version of Windows XP, they'll see no difference with Linux.

Most OEMs bundle "their" Windows with their hardware. Toshiba, for example, images a version of Windows XP with all the drivers for their hardware installed. If you were packaging Linux with as an OEM, you would do the same thing.

When using a boxed Windows XP, the Toshiba laptop here needed video card drivers, WiFi drivers, and audio card drivers downloaded and installed. I would expect the same to be true with a comparable Linux distribution. I'm sure that before HP ships a Linux machine, they have installed all the drivers for the hardware in the machine. Additionally, the lower end hardware has probably more "customized" Windows images on it.

Ask anyone who has rebuilt a laptop from an original Windows XP installation. Then ask them how many drivers were need to bring the machine to the OEM bundle performance. The same would be true of a Linux distribution.

Re:please

[evilviper]

Linux *will* cost at least some money for retailers if they want customers to really take it seriously since they'll need to pay royalties to the owners of formats like mp3 etc,

Really? Until perhaps 2000, Windows didn't come with MP3 support. To this day, it still doesn't come with AAC support, and WMA is a joke.

Windows doesn't include popular video codecs, either. Divx/MPEG-4 is everywhere, but NOT included with Windows... Everyone's still forced to download the codec from Divx.com... And, you guessed it, they provide a Linux version as well.

So, nobody is going to take Linux seriously, because it requires a couple clicks in Synaptic to install every audio and video codec you could ever want (MPlayer/libavcodec). But everyone takes Windows seriously, because it forces you to trawl the web to find every single individual video and audio codec you want to use...

I can see you're right. Linux* is going in the wrong direction... It should be MORE Windows-like, and make multimedia encoding and playback infinitely more difficult.

And as for MP3s... The patent expires in a couple years, and the point becomes moot (see: GIFs).

* (Disclaimer: I'm actually a FreeBSDer... Long live Slackware)