Henrik Edlund wrote: > > On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Andrew Sharp wrote: > > AS> Actually, I don't get the joke, but I'm dense like that sometimes. > AS> However, I will relate an unrelated story. I was representing a > AS> company that spent large amounts of money with the best known PC > AS> supplier in this country. Every computer was immediately wiped of > AS> windows upon delivery and Linux installed. In a meeting with the > AS> manufacturer, I broached the unthinkable: I asked them to sell us > AS> computers with no operating system installed on the hard drives. I > AS> explained our situation to them and the answer was, sure, they could > AS> do that, if we signed a letter of intent for $50k/quarter of > AS> business (which we were already doing), and then they would do it > AS> for an additional $50/machine. I said, well, no, I wanted > AS> $150/machine LESS, because we were no longer buying the Windows > AS> license, and Dell^H^H^H^H unnamed manufacturer would no longer have > AS> to go to the expense of installing the software. They treated this > AS> concept as a joke. I responded appropriately. After, the marketing > AS> veep said, 'Dude, you really reamed him. Was that necessary?' I > AS> said 'we still have choices.' > > The question is why you were buying IBM PC compatibles in the first place > when you could have bought Sun hardware. And if you really needed PC > hardware why not assemble the machines yourself? No Microsoft tax.
Sounds like you are talking about a lot of choices. Choices are good. In this case, though, we were talking about laptops. We could've gotten laptops from ASUS, for example, w/o the penalty, but those lacked features the lusers wanted.... a
