I'd say they got exactly what they wanted from us [LWN.net]

I'd say they got exactly what they wanted from us

Posted Apr 24, 2008 1:21 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: I'd say they got exactly what they wanted from us by jmorris42
Parent article: Negroponte on OLPC's commitment to Sugar

To be fair, the original plan was to retail for $199. When that didn't work it probably made business sense to rethink the Linux decision since $500 machines do have the margin to cover a Windows license.

Confuses costs and prices. Asus have the hot machine of the year. They're obviously going to sell it for as high a price as the market will bear.

As for hiding the Windows costs in the margin, they've gone the other way and reduced the hardware costs of the Eee 900 running Windows. They're retaining that fat margin for as long as they can (ie, until MSI and HP actually ship a competitor rather than talk about shipping a competitor).

That says something very interesting about the low cost of their Linux, even with its heavy modifications.

And note that just as soon as they demonstrated volume sales[2] they used that to negotiate a really sweet deal for XP.

Based on the differences in hardware, the Microsoft license cost looks to be around US$40. That isn't a sweet deal, in fact it's so high that it looks like Microsoft are penalising Asus. I wonder if Asus rejected a sweet deal from Microsoft which proposed dropping Linux from the product altogether? Perhaps the hardware difference is a clever counter-move?

From day one they were including all of the drivers for XP with each unit with the expectation many/most would be reloaded after purchase.

And your evidence that this actually occurred? (eg, nmap scans of Asus Eee MAC addresses on your network.) I don't have any problem with Asus providing Xp drivers -- we've long argued that vendors should be more neutral towards the operating systems running on their hardware and that argument works both ways.

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