Dell Indicates Windows 7 Pricing Will Be Higher 485
ausekilis sends us word that a Dell spokesman said, without giving numbers, that Windows 7 pricing will be higher than Vista's or XP's. "Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive. ... [Darrell] Ward continued, 'In tough economic times, I think it's naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista. ... Schools and government agencies may not be able to afford (the additional cost). Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,' Ward said.'"
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:higher pricing? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't make much sense does it? The old XP and the new 7 costs more than Vista. It's almost as if Vista is being subsidized.
Re:No, probably not (Score:5, Informative)
There is one VERY important factor you are not taking into consideration--the fact that Ubuntu(Canonical Ltd.) makes THEIR money from service, not sales.
If you think about it, this could be a home-run for both Dell and Ubuntu, not to mention the rest of the open-source realm.
Dell and Canonical Ltd. could come to some sort of agreement where the customer service is done by Canonical Ltd. and is pre-paid with the purchase of the of the computer(the service fees charged by Canonical). If Canonical Ltd. determines that the problem is hardware related, the customer is referred to Dell for further service.
Dell could even reimburse Canonical a small sum to offset the inevitable calls that are hardware based, but solved in a few moments without further need of Dell being involved.
Canonical Ltd. comes out smelling like roses, probably with a huge increase in market-share, and Dell washes their hands of most of the CS headaches that they deal with, ones that are mostly the result of problems associated with WINDOWS.
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't like what you hear, discredit the author's opinion by using the words "bait" or "troll". Don't even consider the fact that the author might ACTUALLY hate the Macintosh he's typing upon. No that couldn't possibly be.
Anyway I stand by what I said about OS 10.2 refusing to display youtube.com, or install Flash Player, or run Firefox 3. That's pathetic. Even my ancient Windows 98 laptop will let me watch youtube or other website videos. Why can't OS 10.2? Makes no sense.
Re:No One Here Has Enough Info To Comment (Score:2, Informative)
But, as you said, we don't have the information. We do know that the cost of shipping Linux is $0 and the cost of shipping Windows is $X. For some value of X > 0. We also suspect that shipping a version of Linux costs them Y for Y > 0 because they have to pay protection [wikipedia.org] to Microsoft. We don't know how much the crapware people [wikipedia.org] are paying Dell (et al) for their junk to be included.
But for an OS - without crapware, without coerced payments to microsoft for protection money, without advertising and junk - we know that linux is cheaper and (for the most part) better. We know that Dell (et al) are doing what Microsoft wants because Microsoft is the big bully on the playground. And we know that everyone goes along with it because at some point some Microsoft peon (perhaps the public schools, perhaps a cheezy university), perhaps their boss, said "Microsoft is the Beez Kneez" and they (sadly) bought the party line. Very little different than the peasants in Stalin-land.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cash Cow (Score:2, Informative)
When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
As long as you don't need more than 4GB of addressing space...
XP : now in 64-bit [newegg.com] flavor (Newegg link as they appear to be willing to still sell it, unlike Microsoft).
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Never worked with many systems? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Informative)
I have purely anecdotal evidence to the contrary (BTW your evidence is anecdotal as well :) )
I've seen people buy 50 computers at a time. Something works well with 9/10 out of a big box, but on 1 of them it is just completely screwed up. Using the restore disk fixes all the issues. I think it might be that QC has slipped at Dell, and for some reason, 1 out of 10 of the assembly lines didn't get updated to the proper mirror update?
Agree with the rest of your post about the crap-ware, but these were commercial customers that don't get the crap-ware in the first place.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Informative)
> Oh PLEASE! You want to know why the OEMs ain't selling Linux boxes now? It is because the
> hardware you pick up to go with your new PC at Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples don't work in
> Linux, that's why. Linux is a fricking support nightmare when it comes to home users!
1998 Called. It want's it's FUD back.
I've bought hardware for Linux at all of those places without being terribly
concerned about Linux compatability. Occassionally I wil forget to consider
it entirely and still come out of it unscathed.
Normal consumers have very meagre demands all around and device support
on Linux is hardly the nightmare you make it out to be.
There's certainly a lot of fear mongering that goes on about it.
Thanks for participating.
I always get a chuckle out of rants like yours whenever I see one of
those warnings on a USB device warning you to not plug it in until
you've installed the drivers first...
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe this is the "Mac tax" everyone talks about? I never understood what that meant, but if Mac users have to keep spending ~$150 every other year to upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 (plus the necessary RAM upgrades), then that could get damn expensive.
Except that... you didn't spend ANY of that money upgrading THAT machine. Not even your friend spent the money.
So now you can spend ~$150 for the first time ever in that machine's life and get 10.4 on it. That should be enough for the life of that old Mac. Or maybe it can handle 10.5, that's even better.
I've had the same XP installation since 2002. I've never had to spend a dime to upgrade from XP to SP1 to SP2 to SP3.
That's because MS delayed the release of Longhorn (Vista) for so many years: there was no new OS to upgrade XP to. (Originally Longhorn was expected to ship in late 2003, and yes, you would have had to pay for it.) And when they finally released Vista... it turned out to be so bloated that pretty much no PC from 2002 would is able to handle it anyway!
On the Mac side the best approach would have been to skip 10.3 and buy 10.4 in 2005. There you have it. $150 in total and you would have had a kick-ass machine with an OS that many consider better than XP or Vista for four years now.
But no. Your friend had to be cheap.
Re:Never worked with many systems? (Score:2, Informative)
Way to think like a Windows user...
Many Linux distros have generic kernels available. It's the kernel's job to detect the motherboard/chipset and utilize the proper modules or wired-in definitions (if necessary)
And tools like Kudzu autodetection are useful also.
Think "plug and play", and not like Windows' "plug and pray".
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, as far as imaging goes, it's very different. Linux is notoriously finicky when it comes to hardware, windows has always been more forgiving, and even Vista at release had fewer hardware issues than Linux has always been stuck with.
MS also has a number of free tools - the most basic and essential being sysprep which finds and installs all drivers on boot and resets SIDs among other things - to make mass imaging deployments really worthwhile starting around windows 2000, and starting with Vista it is so easy to create images that work on a huge variety of hardware it's almost rediculous. I know of no Linux equivalent, and that's a bigger issue than you may realize.
MS even got rid of the standard windows setup procedure in Vista and moved even non-oem OS installs (i.e. from disc) to the imaging model. If you look on a Vista install DVD you'll see a number of .wim files and a .iso or two. Properly configured, WinPE (comes with Vista) + ImageX (free download, comes with Vista) + Sysprep (not sure if it actually comes with Vista officially, but with ImageX you can dig around in the Vista wim file and copy it out of there, or you can download it from MS for free) all add up to an image that works on virtually any hardware.
My company uses just one image for at least 50,000 pc's, maybe more, about 10 different manufacturers and about 20 models apiece. So, yeah. It's harder to set up in Vista, but it is doable. I can't wait till Windows7 gets cleared for my environment so I can start playing with the server side tools, since Vista will never be approved and the server tools don't work for making XP images (they work for deployment though).
This also may be a reason for the reluctance to push Linux. If there aren't effective tools for mass-imaging both OEM and enterprise level deployments for Linux it could easilly add significant costs to the sale of Linux PCs. Theoretically you could use MS imaging tools (which, gotta say again, are awesome, Ghost aint shit no more), but you can't use sysprep, which is the bread and butter of OEM windows installs. I don't know what a linux equivalent would be, and without it you are limited to one image per each individual hardware configuration. You may be able to script some of it, but eventually you are just installing a straight up Linux install. The cost savings in time and manpower of the image deployment model vs the scripted install model is really, very significant. We are talking a machine is ready to package and ship in 5-10 minutes verses 30 minutes or an hour or even more depending on what had to be done to the install. That's huge.
If you try to go with imagine for Linux without a mass deployment tool to save time (and therefore money), you are talking hundreds of images to deploy Linux vs just one for Windows. I guess you'd have to be rolling your own mass produced images (like I do, heh) to understand how much manpower that is going to add to the sale of a Linux PC. Just trust me that it is significant. That $200 gap really starts to dwindle if you have image deployment inefficiencies. Coupled with crapware savings, and it could easilly be a wash or worse for Linux.
This is actually the first time I've thought about the whole problem like that, and I think I finally get why you don't see massive savings for linux PCs except in situations where the hardware pool is small and constant (i.e. OLPC, initial EEEPC, etc).
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? I've rarely if ever had a Linux install not boot, even on the most alien hardware from the initial install. In the old days, you could be sure that some devices might not work, but at least the thing would boot. Windows is horrible, and while by Server 2003, it had improved, disaster recovery to new hardware (including VMs) is still no mean feat. In the old days, when I was compiling my own kernels, I usually had two bootable ones; one with all the drivers and optimized settings I needed for any given install, and a basic kernel with IDE/ATA and common SCSI drivers, completely vanilla, that could boot pretty much flawlessly on anything from an Intel to a Via board. I never hard a hardware crash that caused me more than a few hours work with my Linux boxes, but I had some Windows 2000 Server installs that were absolute nightmares.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Informative)
The whole premise of your post seems off to me. Linux loads just about everything at runtime. You don't need a sysprep equivalent because it doesn't store the driver it's going to use. For example consider Window's weird USB support; I think this might be fixed in Vista, but I'm not 100% sure. Certainly with XP if you plug a USB storage device into a USB port, it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Remove it and plug the exact same thing into a different USB port... it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Plug it in to the same port and it's instantly available.
This goes to the core of driver support, even well into the "Plug and Play" era: Windows always associates drivers with particular hardware device addresses and has to store configuration information whenever that changes. No such issues on Linux. The closest you'd get is having to clean up the udev files which ensure particularly hardware gets assigned the same device name each boot (i.e. the various _persistent_ rulefiles).
The only other issue you might have is if the kernel is unable to boot on the hardware, though pretty much all distributions use large initrds which include drivers for virtually everything.
Once upon a time I rebuilt my PC, and decided to see if I could get away with not having to re-install Windows as the build was very similar. It did in fact work quite well. I had a dual boot system. Linux booted up as normal, just a bit faster because of the faster processor etc. Windows booted up okay, then futzed around saying it was installing drivers for my new hardware and needed a reboot or two before it was happy. It wasn't quite right though, as from thereafter it never shut down properly. It would shut down Windows, but wouldn't turn the power off or reboot. I guess the power management was slightly different with the new motherboard, and Windows had at some point installed something specific for the previous chipset. The Linux kernel just works out what needs to be done each time it's booted, and so it all worked perfectly fine.
At work I've upgraded a Linux server installed on an HP DL360 to a DL380 just by moving the drives to the new system. The only complication I would ever imagine facing is if the hardware RAID controller doesn't recognise the drives, but I didn't have that issue as they were similar-generation. I wouldn't even try that with a Windows install, because even if the hardware seems to be 100% identical Windows will still notice different device IDs and have a hissy fit. The only problem I encountered with the Linux install was that the network interfaces were assigned silly names because it was reserving eth0 and eth1 for the previous IDs; again, just nuking those persistent config files and rebooted sorted it out.
You do make a good point about kickbacks from pre-installing all the garbage you get with a big manufacturer PC. While they could do the same thing with Linux, I'd imagine most people opting for Linux at this stage would find that to be a complete deal-breaker. In addition, the fact that Windows and Linux are in many ways very different platforms does add complications -- they've had many many years to organise their deployment strategies and toolchains around Windows' peculiarities, and adapting to the peculiarities of any other system will obviously involve some cost.
I would also imagine that they make some amount of profit by including commercial software, in the same way a retail shop selling boxes of software makes a bit of profit. If everything you're including is free software, then it's harder to profit off of that -- the natural end-game would seem to be vendors competing purely on the basis of hardware costs, which I don't think any of them particularly want to do.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Informative)
If your experience is that an unattended install takes longer than 30 minutes, then you're doing something wrong. I do this as a part of my job, and a higly specialized unattended install based on Mandriva 2008.0 takes between 15-20 minutes, and that includes a whole bunch of in-house configuration and applications.
Getting down to ~10 minutes would be no problem if I just got rid of all that extra stuff - depending on hardware of course.
Within those ten minutes a linux install would include all the productivity tools that a normal user would need.
Your argument that unattended install is more expensive is flawed... My anecdote doesn't prove the opposite but at least it gives a pointer in the other direction.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Informative)