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Dell addicted to the upsell and the kickback ^H^H marketing assistanceDell addicted to the upsell and the kickback ^H^H marketing assistancePosted Mar 13, 2007 11:43 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)Parent article: OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter
Dell makes money from people ticking the "Microsoft Office" box when ordering a machine. Why would they offer a competing product that would lower the odds of someone selecting the upsell? Perhaps there are reasons, but I don't see them in the letter. For this, and a Linux option, to succeed Dell are going to need to reinvent themselves. Luckily for us, that's happening so for once our timing is good. Dell have been burnt badly by hanging onto their Intel kickbacks as long as possible and having HP walk away from them by giving customers a choice. Perhaps Dell would listen to a story saying "this is the same scenario, don't make the wrong decision this time". Dell's Linux support is excellent -- on their servers. So parts of the company do understand Linux. On the Linux support issue, "which distribution" is the wrong question. The answer is "any distribution you please if you put patches to the mainline kernel". Then the support monkey moves from Dell to the Linux distributor. Even if Dell supported only RHEL it wouldn't matter as long as the patches for that support went upstream. What is important is to support all of the hardware on the laptop or desktop, this implies that the message needs to make its way to the hardware designers that the availability of Linux driver free source code or non-NDA programming specification is a new constraint on component choice.
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