Dell start selling PC's with Linux

Well, starting this morning, DELL are starting to sell Linux pre-installed on selected workstations, dell asks for additional 99$ for the installation. Full report from News.com is here. Speaking of pre-installing, IBM just told Info-world reporters that they will keep selling Linux servers, but they will "wait-and-see" about selling Workstation pre-installed with Linux. Am I the only one who thinks that IBM need to learn about selling from Dell?

Comments

Dell UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt many of you Linux kiddies remember, but Dell had its own UNIX division back in the early 90's. They did their own port of SVR4.2, and it was considered one of the best UNIX ports out there -- they turned thousands of lines of bug fixes back to AT&T. Alas, it proved unprofitable and was shut down.

$20 and not $99

[Caleb]

I don't know where you find 99 dollars extra.

The article mentions costing 20 bucks over the NT installation. This probably has to do with adding the LinuxCare support contract on top of the Microsoft pricing deal.

oh, come on, give Dell a break...

[Holgate]

Two cheers for Dell. Let's give them half a break here. In the months since the report came out on how OEMs refused to "unbundle" Windows from their machine, we've gone from:

1) Dell "not perceiving a market for Linux" to
2) Dell "not perceiving a market for Linux workstations" to
3) Dell providing for that market.

That's a lot of movement in a few months. And Dell aren't stupid. They know that Linux development is probably going to be less fragmented than MS's in the coming year or so, what with the glacial move towards Win2K, and the potential for a corporate dissection by the courts.

For sure, Linux comes at a premium now, but that's due to economies of scale. And Dell isn't a company for the purist who wants a machine built from scratch; they build solid, reliable, top-end machines and provide top-notch support. They're your boss's choice, and if your boss sees "Linux" among the options, at $99 extra, (s)he's going to wonder what's so good about Linux that Dell make you pay extra for it...

I'm writing this now, on my 1997 Dell machine, running Debian. I've no complaints. Yet another step towards world domination, yet another line in the sand trampled over.

Money probably goes for support staff

[reemul]

The $99 isn't for the code, the drives are cloned and the software is free, its for support staff. If they are installing it themselves, they are committing to having it work, and supporting it through their normal channels. They have to pay for testers, to certify the few configurations they presently offer. They have to pay for devs, to tweak everything for their specific config. And they have to pay to train and staff the phone monkeys, to handle all the wacky calls.

It would be much too much of a pain to us and to them to treat Linux-equipped machines differently from MS boxes, and only have pay-as-you go support when everyone else is under warranty. They'd have to clearly identify machines with factory Linux, maybe even a special set of serial numbers, to tell who gets what support. And the cultists would probably whine about a Gates-led conspiracy then, too. So they have to have Linux trained bodies to throw at the phone bank in case some script-kiddie in Iowa talks daddy into buying him a redhat box, and then promptly blows it up doing something deeply stupid. Dell doesn't care if the end-user is an idiot, they'll still sell the machine. The normal Linux idiot filter, where by the time a person can get it to work he has to know at least a little about his machine, fails when its guaranteed to work out of the box.

Once they sell more boxes - and have metrics about how few Linux users have to call for Dell help - the margin will drop. Simple as that. The first people to buy will get charged more to pay to offset the risk Dell is taking, to add the staff before they sell the machines. As selling factory-installed redhat becomes part of normal business, and the folks needed become part of the normal staffing requirements, the cost difference will probably lean toward Linux' favor.

But you can still blame Bill Gates if you want, far be it from me to take away what little joy some of you get from life.

$99? More like $1000!!!!

[miniver]

I decided to browse on down to Dell and price a Linux workstation, just to see that $20 difference. Since Windows NT costs so much more than Red Hat Linux, I wanted to see where the $20 came from.

For starters, the Linux version is sold on a different price page than the Windows 9X/NT version, and has *much* fewer options -- no dual processor options, no sound card options, misc other options missing. The options for the two pages are in different sequences, making comparison much harder too.

After grumbling a bit, I pulled up 2 browser windows, and side-by-side matched options for the following configuration:

Precision 410 MiniTower, Pentium II/450, 128mb ECC RAM, (1) 9gb SCSI HD, 21" UltraScan 1600HS monitor, Diamond Permedia 2 AGP graphics card, IOMEGA ATAPI Zip drive

The price for Windows NT: $3891

The price for Linux: $4809

What's wrong with this picture???

Don't Freak About the $99

[the red pen]

This may look like a "Linux Tax" but it may, in part, represent the difference in "economies of scale" for a Linux purchase. The manufacture, software install, and delivery for a Linux system may require extra handling, increasing the cost.

Is it $99 worth of difference? I don't know, I don't think very many people know for sure.

I'd be happy to pay the extra $99 (for a laptop -- I put my own desktop systems together) if and only if Microsoft doesn't get a dime of my purchase.

Mixed Reports on Pricing: What's the Real Deal?

[ewhac]

We've got one post up there that says the Linux-configured box is $1K more than the NT box, while some other posts say that the Linux box is $200 cheaper.

Could someone do a detailed comparison?

Schwab

No large websites on linux?!

[merentha]

From DejaNews(obviously biased)website:
Deja News is one of the top destination sites on the Web, with some four to five million unique users a month who generate more than 125+ million pageviews monthly.

Which would be about 3 million hits/day. Check netcraft, and you find - Linux/Apache.

They claim to process over a million articles a day as well. And it's a remarkably responsive site.

All the more reason....

[Kit Cosper]

It's obvious that the larger vendors are only giving a degree of lip service to Linux. In the meantime there are still those of us out here who have been in the trenches for 3 or more years doing everything we can to promote Linux. Of course I'm speaking of Linux Hardware Solutions (us) and VA Research. The Fortune 500 is full of servers from LINUX system vendors.

For example, we've got a client that has used 4 of our SMP boxes with 100+ GB of RAID storage to help replace a couple of mainframes. I'm sure the folks at VA have similar stories. We're both offering onsite service and you can get Linux installed the way you want. No hassles, no worries.

Before anyone calls either of us a "garage" business we've just signed a lease for a new facility and VA is in the middle of relocating. Neither of us are Dell (yet :-) but we're both a long way from where we started.

--Kit