On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> Ethan Benson wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 10:22:53PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > > Andrew Sharp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > >
> > > > Remember that these computers *come* with MacOS, which you paid for,
> > > > and DVDs play fine with that.
> >
> > and 99.9% of all x86 computers *come* with Windows, which you paid
> > for, so why should be we bother with anything at all? </sarcasm>
>
> Actually, I don't get the joke, but I'm dense like that sometimes.
> However, I will relate an unrelated story. I was representing a
> company that spent large amounts of money with the best known PC
> supplier in this country. Every computer was immediately wiped of
> windows upon delivery and Linux installed. In a meeting with the
> manufacturer, I broached the unthinkable: I asked them to sell us
> computers with no operating system installed on the hard drives. I
> explained our situation to them and the answer was, sure, they could
> do that, if we signed a letter of intent for $50k/quarter of
> business (which we were already doing), and then they would do it
> for an additional $50/machine. I said, well, no, I wanted
> $150/machine LESS, because we were no longer buying the Windows
> license, and Dell^H^H^H^H unnamed manufacturer would no longer have
> to go to the expense of installing the software. They treated this
> concept as a joke. I responded appropriately. After, the marketing
> veep said, 'Dude, you really reamed him. Was that necessary?' I
> said 'we still have choices.'
My experiences with the same unnamed manufacturer:
http://home.tvd.be/cr26864/DELL_and_MS.html
Now they stopped selling workstations with Linux (which were charged higher
than the same machine with the more expensive OS), they can no longer use `but
you can buy them _with_ Linux preinstalled' as an excuse... Not that it
matters, though.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
