Slashdot Mirror
Dell Indicates Windows 7 Pricing Will Be Higher
ausekilis sends us word that a Dell spokesman said, without giving numbers, that Windows 7 pricing will be higher than Vista's or XP's. "Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive. ... [Darrell] Ward continued, 'In tough economic times, I think it's naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista. ... Schools and government agencies may not be able to afford (the additional cost). Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,' Ward said.'"
There is one VERY important factor you are not taking into consideration--the fact that Ubuntu(Canonical Ltd.) makes THEIR money from service, not sales.
If you think about it, this could be a home-run for both Dell and Ubuntu, not to mention the rest of the open-source realm.
Dell and Canonical Ltd. could come to some sort of agreement where the customer service is done by Canonical Ltd. and is pre-paid with the purchase of the of the computer(the service fees charged by Canonical). If Canonical Ltd. determines that the problem is hardware related, the customer is referred to Dell for further service.
Dell could even reimburse Canonical a small sum to offset the inevitable calls that are hardware based, but solved in a few moments without further need of Dell being involved.
Canonical Ltd. comes out smelling like roses, probably with a huge increase in market-share, and Dell washes their hands of most of the CS headaches that they deal with, ones that are mostly the result of problems associated with WINDOWS.
Nonsense! All they have to do is set up one standard Ubuntu install and clone it, just like they do for Windows.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Same with windows with all the drivers. It's no different.
> Oh PLEASE! You want to know why the OEMs ain't selling Linux boxes now? It is because the
> hardware you pick up to go with your new PC at Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples don't work in
> Linux, that's why. Linux is a fricking support nightmare when it comes to home users!
1998 Called. It want's it's FUD back.
I've bought hardware for Linux at all of those places without being terribly
concerned about Linux compatability. Occassionally I wil forget to consider
it entirely and still come out of it unscathed.
Normal consumers have very meagre demands all around and device support
on Linux is hardly the nightmare you make it out to be.
There's certainly a lot of fear mongering that goes on about it.
Thanks for participating.
I always get a chuckle out of rants like yours whenever I see one of
those warnings on a USB device warning you to not plug it in until
you've installed the drivers first...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, as far as imaging goes, it's very different. Linux is notoriously finicky when it comes to hardware, windows has always been more forgiving, and even Vista at release had fewer hardware issues than Linux has always been stuck with.
MS also has a number of free tools - the most basic and essential being sysprep which finds and installs all drivers on boot and resets SIDs among other things - to make mass imaging deployments really worthwhile starting around windows 2000, and starting with Vista it is so easy to create images that work on a huge variety of hardware it's almost rediculous. I know of no Linux equivalent, and that's a bigger issue than you may realize.
MS even got rid of the standard windows setup procedure in Vista and moved even non-oem OS installs (i.e. from disc) to the imaging model. If you look on a Vista install DVD you'll see a number of .wim files and a .iso or two. Properly configured, WinPE (comes with Vista) + ImageX (free download, comes with Vista) + Sysprep (not sure if it actually comes with Vista officially, but with ImageX you can dig around in the Vista wim file and copy it out of there, or you can download it from MS for free) all add up to an image that works on virtually any hardware.
My company uses just one image for at least 50,000 pc's, maybe more, about 10 different manufacturers and about 20 models apiece. So, yeah. It's harder to set up in Vista, but it is doable. I can't wait till Windows7 gets cleared for my environment so I can start playing with the server side tools, since Vista will never be approved and the server tools don't work for making XP images (they work for deployment though).
This also may be a reason for the reluctance to push Linux. If there aren't effective tools for mass-imaging both OEM and enterprise level deployments for Linux it could easilly add significant costs to the sale of Linux PCs. Theoretically you could use MS imaging tools (which, gotta say again, are awesome, Ghost aint shit no more), but you can't use sysprep, which is the bread and butter of OEM windows installs. I don't know what a linux equivalent would be, and without it you are limited to one image per each individual hardware configuration. You may be able to script some of it, but eventually you are just installing a straight up Linux install. The cost savings in time and manpower of the image deployment model vs the scripted install model is really, very significant. We are talking a machine is ready to package and ship in 5-10 minutes verses 30 minutes or an hour or even more depending on what had to be done to the install. That's huge.
If you try to go with imagine for Linux without a mass deployment tool to save time (and therefore money), you are talking hundreds of images to deploy Linux vs just one for Windows. I guess you'd have to be rolling your own mass produced images (like I do, heh) to understand how much manpower that is going to add to the sale of a Linux PC. Just trust me that it is significant. That $200 gap really starts to dwindle if you have image deployment inefficiencies. Coupled with crapware savings, and it could easilly be a wash or worse for Linux.
This is actually the first time I've thought about the whole problem like that, and I think I finally get why you don't see massive savings for linux PCs except in situations where the hardware pool is small and constant (i.e. OLPC, initial EEEPC, etc).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The whole premise of your post seems off to me. Linux loads just about everything at runtime. You don't need a sysprep equivalent because it doesn't store the driver it's going to use. For example consider Window's weird USB support; I think this might be fixed in Vista, but I'm not 100% sure. Certainly with XP if you plug a USB storage device into a USB port, it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Remove it and plug the exact same thing into a different USB port... it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Plug it in to the same port and it's instantly available.
This goes to the core of driver support, even well into the "Plug and Play" era: Windows always associates drivers with particular hardware device addresses and has to store configuration information whenever that changes. No such issues on Linux. The closest you'd get is having to clean up the udev files which ensure particularly hardware gets assigned the same device name each boot (i.e. the various _persistent_ rulefiles).
The only other issue you might have is if the kernel is unable to boot on the hardware, though pretty much all distributions use large initrds which include drivers for virtually everything.
Once upon a time I rebuilt my PC, and decided to see if I could get away with not having to re-install Windows as the build was very similar. It did in fact work quite well. I had a dual boot system. Linux booted up as normal, just a bit faster because of the faster processor etc. Windows booted up okay, then futzed around saying it was installing drivers for my new hardware and needed a reboot or two before it was happy. It wasn't quite right though, as from thereafter it never shut down properly. It would shut down Windows, but wouldn't turn the power off or reboot. I guess the power management was slightly different with the new motherboard, and Windows had at some point installed something specific for the previous chipset. The Linux kernel just works out what needs to be done each time it's booted, and so it all worked perfectly fine.
At work I've upgraded a Linux server installed on an HP DL360 to a DL380 just by moving the drives to the new system. The only complication I would ever imagine facing is if the hardware RAID controller doesn't recognise the drives, but I didn't have that issue as they were similar-generation. I wouldn't even try that with a Windows install, because even if the hardware seems to be 100% identical Windows will still notice different device IDs and have a hissy fit. The only problem I encountered with the Linux install was that the network interfaces were assigned silly names because it was reserving eth0 and eth1 for the previous IDs; again, just nuking those persistent config files and rebooted sorted it out.
You do make a good point about kickbacks from pre-installing all the garbage you get with a big manufacturer PC. While they could do the same thing with Linux, I'd imagine most people opting for Linux at this stage would find that to be a complete deal-breaker. In addition, the fact that Windows and Linux are in many ways very different platforms does add complications -- they've had many many years to organise their deployment strategies and toolchains around Windows' peculiarities, and adapting to the peculiarities of any other system will obviously involve some cost.
I would also imagine that they make some amount of profit by including commercial software, in the same way a retail shop selling boxes of software makes a bit of profit. If everything you're including is free software, then it's harder to profit off of that -- the natural end-game would seem to be vendors competing purely on the basis of hardware costs, which I don't think any of them particularly want to do.