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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Apr 10, 2012 22:48 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by khim Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
You need bigger margins, not the same margins, or else the whole exercise is pointless. For that manufacturer need some kind of lock-in - that's what I'm talking about. As a PC manufacturer, you can't »lock in« people to your hardware (unless you're Apple, but we already said that special rules apply to Apple). If anything, a desire to create lock-in would be an argument in favour of preinstalling Linux as long as your Linux distribution is good enough and supports your machine well, because as long as you're the only one selling such a machine people will continue being your customers. This works for Apple – Macintoshes could just as well run Windows but people tend to stick with the OS X that comes with the machine. The margins on Macs aren't quite like the ones on iPhones, but we don't see Apple complain. In the same vein, if a good computer came pre-installed with a good, supported mainstream Linux like Debian (rather than the low-end boxes with weird Linux distributions that hardware manufacturers tend to offer if they offer anything at all), most people would probably stay with that because putting anything else on it would be more of a hassle than it was worth.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 11, 2012 6:05 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If anything, a desire to create lock-in would be an argument in favour of preinstalling Linux as long as your Linux distribution is good enough and supports your machine well, because as long as you're the only one selling such a machine people will continue being your customers. Nope. Others sell similar machines, too. Both tiny firms with full selection of models (tiny selection because firms are tiny) and large companies like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - but with few models (again: Linux is not large enough to support the large range of models). This works for Apple – Macintoshes could just as well run Windows but people tend to stick with the OS X that comes with the machine. Some actually install Linux and/or Windows, but that's not the point. The point is that MacOS works poorly on anything else and Apple vigorously ensures that there will be no machines with Hackintosh preinstalled. This is where lock-in scheme starts to work and this is what you can not do with Linux. In the same vein, if a good computer came pre-installed with a good, supported mainstream Linux like Debian (rather than the low-end boxes with weird Linux distributions that hardware manufacturers tend to offer if they offer anything at all), most people would probably stay with that because putting anything else on it would be more of a hassle than it was worth. This was tried many times. It does not work. People find something deficient with tiny selection of “Linux preinstalled” offers and buy something else instead. And it makes no sense to create as many models with Linux as you create models with Windows if you expect 10x-100x less buyers.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 11, 2012 7:53 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] This was tried many times. It does not work. People find something deficient with tiny selection of “Linux preinstalled” offers and buy something else instead. When I bought my current computer (an HP business notebook), HP did offer one configuration with Linux preinstalled. That was the bottom-of-the-line configuration with the slowest CPU and GPU, the lowest screen resolution, the smallest hard disk and half the RAM of the one I eventually got. It does not come as a big surprise that under these circumstances buying the machine with Linux preinstalled is not the option most customers will take. On the »plus« side, the machine I bought in the end is also very nice for Linux, with basically everything working out of the box using Debian (I've so far not missed the fingerprint reader, and somebody like HP could probably get that supported by leaning on the chip manufacturer). It does make one wonder why HP does not offer a Linux preinstall for the top-of-the-line configuration rather than the bottom one. In my experience, installing Linux on notebooks has become a lot easier over the years. Whether this is due to improvements in Linux itself or the manufacturers moving towards supported components is difficult to tell (probably a mixture of both), but the presence of any configurations of a model with Linux preinstalled is a good sign because it indicates that Linux will probably work well on the other configurations, too. There is certainly nothing technical that prevents manufacturers from offering more Linux preinstalls – the reason why this doesn't happen more often is mostly to do with Microsoft's sleazy business practices.
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