🚀 go-pugleaf

On 19/07/10 1:00 PM, John Higdon wrote:
> In article<i2298i$45c$3@news.eternal-september.org>,
>   sfdavidkaye2@yahoo.com (David Kaye) wrote:
>
>> Hardware vendors have been free to install any OS they wanted.  And for a
>> brief window of time, they could install a MacOS -- until Steve Jobs came
>> back
>> and killed that program.
>
> I do recall the agreements Microsoft had with vendors: install Windows
> exclusively or loose the low-pricing on your wholesale agreement.

You didn't actually have to install it, but you had to pay the licensing 
fee for every machine you produced.

> Indeed, when we bought large quantities of PCs from Mini Micro, they
> would wipe the Windows from them for us, but they would not give us any
> price break (since they were claiming to be selling Windows PCs
> exclusively and they needed their quantities to match).
>
>> The trouble with vendors putting a Linux flavor on their computers is who is
>> going to support them?  I will.  And who else?
>
> Linux is so quick and easy to install that we didn't care if the
> computers came with it or not. What annoyed us was having to pay the
> Microsoft Tax. And for that money, we didn't even get a licensed copy of
> Windows.

You can look at it that way, or you can look at from the view that the 
economies of scale that they gained by building mass quantities of PCs 
with Windows installed resulted in lower prices than you would have paid 
had they done a special build for you without the OS.

At one Taiwanese PC manufacturer I worked for, if we agreed to install 
Windows on every machine, about 100K per month, we got one price for the 
OS. If we wanted to install it on only 99K of 100K per month (assuming 
1% of customers did not want Windows) we would have paid a much higher 
price. It was much cheaper to install it on every machine, even if we 
had to eat the cost for the rare customer that did not want Windows. But 
Microsoft was perfectly willing to sell us the OS on a non-exclusive 
basis had we been foolish enough to choose that option. Microsoft was 
not the first OS company to use such a pricing system. It was done long 
before Windows was around.

Linux was always a royal PITA. There were (and are) so many different 
versions, with the need to ensure that every hardware configuration you 
sell has the proper drivers, it can drive you crazy. The support 
requirements are enormous because once you sell the system with Linux 
the customer holds you responsible for support when any piece of 
hardware they add to the system doesn't work. Things have greatly 
improved in the last few years, but you still have to worry about all 
the different Linux variants.

Linux is free, if time has no value.