On 10/02/11 11:32, Matt S wrote: > That was my concern exactly. That I would be unable to put the OS of my > choice on hardware that I bought. This is precisely why I don't own an iPad > or iPhone - I want ownership of what I bought.
And that there is the answer. Complain all you want, if you spend the money on the product, you have just said, "I accept this product exactly as it is, I like this product more than I like having the money in my pocket" and all your complaining becomes moot. The vendor's job is to get your money. That's how you indicate satisfaction with a product -- not the protests and complaints. The reason a vendor wants you happy is to get a future chance to get your money. If they got your money and you are complaining about something you KNEW was the case at the time of purchase (or you didn't return the machine when you found out the "limitation"), guess how much value your complaint has to them? ZERO. The computer world is still a relatively free market, with several vendors and a fair degree of competition. Even companies the size of Intel have discovered -- the hard way -- they can't cram crap down the customer's throat without risking making a trivial, trivially small competitor a big player (Intel did it a few times... RAMBUS -> VIA, Itanium -> AMD). Look at the damage Microsoft has done to Linux -- from what I have seen, every time MS does one of their anti-Linux campaigns, awareness and acceptance of Linux in the workplace goes UP, and I've heard at least a few pure Microsoft shops keep a few Linux-related resources floating around in plain site to work the prices down when the MS reps come through... Sometimes I wish Microsoft would perceive OpenBSD as a threat. :) A lot of us in the open source world do a lot with "recycled" computers -- computers that have lived out their first life cycle, and now being used for less demanding applications (i.e., non-windows). This requires a little work on our part -- we need to make sure that decision makers know that any machine locked into the Windows world (or even a particular version of Windows) are of near zero value to reusers. When they point out that they already hand the old machines over to recyclers for free, point out the recyclers expect to make some money off their action -- if they can't, your purchasers will need to PAY (or pay more) for system disposal. This may be a harder change than not personally buying a new machine from a restrictive vendor, but make it clear that you see their talk about "green" computers complete bullshit if they are not going to make it possible to recycle-into-production older computers (another example: the manufacturers who now prevent you from using disks they didn't provide in their machines, or prevent you from buying their proprietary disk carriers without their over-priced, under-performing disks. Value of machine after warranty expiration: Near zero). Nick.
