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Guaranteeing "no demand" through poor productsGuaranteeing "no demand" through poor productsPosted Feb 1, 2013 20:45 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Guaranteeing "no demand" through poor products by apoelstra Parent article: LCA: The future of the Linux desktop
Have you actually read the article? The crapware vendors and Microsoft put heavy pressure on them not to admit the truth. Not even close. Crapware vendors pay them money. Nothing more, nothing less. Price of Windows+Crapware for major vendors is negative (that is: vendors actually receive more money from crapware vendors then they pay Microsoft) and for some strange reason Linux-lovers are unwilling to pay more for a system with Linux preinstalled to compensate for the loss. If they were to offer Linux in a truly valuable way, of course their vendors would be very upset, and might even withdraw their support. Crapware vendors don't care, but Microsoft is very aware and it makes it hard to sell computers with Linux (actually any OS other then Windows): Linux system must be separate entity, you can not offer dual-boot and you can not offer pick-your-OS-at-the-checkout-time service (not if you want to keep the discounts). This is well-known phenomenon, I don't see where your make it as unattractive as possible so that people won't buy it, and then point to the lack of interest in the product as a "justification" of the strategy of not offering it in the first place idea comes from. Hardware vendors do offer the best possible Linux support they realistically can, but well, they are businesses, to sell Linux systems with a loss to satisfy some strange ideas is not something publicly trading company can justify for long.
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Guaranteeing "no demand" through poor products Posted Feb 1, 2013 21:42 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I don't see where your make it as unattractive as possible so that people won't buy it, and then point to the lack of interest in the product as a "justification" of the strategy of not offering it in the first place idea comes from. I'm being quoted there so I'll respond to that. By unattractive I mean offer a token product at the low-end (presumably because Linux users are cheapskates or poor or something) so that when people look at the specification and realise that it's not very attractive as a product - the screen isn't very big, or there's less memory, or the CPU has half the number of cores, or whatever, compared to the next model up in the range - they then mumble about it not meeting their needs or expectations and then go and buy the next (or next but one) model up, wipe the disk, and install Linux on it themselves. Result: one Windows sale, no Linux sale. Why would a company offer something unattractive - an "economy" model - instead of something else? That's the interesting question. It's not necessarily the case that the more expensive computer costs more for them to put Linux onto it and roll it out as a separate product, so you can't claim that the token Linux product at the low-end is dipping a toe in the water whereas a token mid-range or high-end Linux product would be sticking their whole leg in the water, especially since some of these vendors ship Linux on their workstation and server offerings already. Why would a company use the lack of a response from customers as justification of a lack of Linux products? I would imagine that there's a continuous stream of requests and enquiries on sites like Dell's IdeaStorm (or whatever it's called) as well as from random customers. Doing nothing doesn't look very good, and doing just a bit more than nothing is the next best thing and looks a whole lot better. Result: "people don't buy these things when we offer them, but we will continue to review demand going forward" plus business as usual.
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