🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:05:35 -0700, in
<4c44cc28$0$22164$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>, SMS
<scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:

>On 19/07/10 1:00 PM, John Higdon wrote:

>> 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.

You obviously don't understand Linux either --
those vendors offering Linux typically offered only one variant,
so that simply wasn't an issue.

-- 
John

"It is better to sit in silence and appear ignorant,
than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." -Mark Twain
"A little learning is a dangerous thing." -Alexander Pope
"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, 
as being unwilling to learn." -Benjamin Franklin