Dell Recommended" 11268 plus 1

Well, consider your answer above. Dell sees a large group of computer buyers who apparently want to buy a computer at a good price that works with Windows. Whether they want that out of ignorance of anything better or out of a genuine, reasoned decision, the supplier senses that a product that includes Windows XP would meet that group's wants so that is what they supply. In order to do that, the supplier has to deal with Intel, Microsoft, and various other high-volume suppliers of the components that make up the package. Then the supplier offers the package at a price point that the market will accept and that meets the supplier's internal requirements for profitability. That goes on all the time with nothing special about it. Well, that is just a figure of speech. Subsbreastute "Sales is simply the process used to separate a customer from his hard earned cash..." if you prefer.

But you are not then buying a Wintel computer. There may very well be a market for a "Lintel" computer and someone supplying that sort of configuration will have a cost advantage on the raw cost of the product versus the Wintel supplier. OTOH, the Lintel supplier has a market education expense that the Wintel supplier does not have. The total costs for Lintel may be higher than for Wintel if the supplier sees a need to do market education under those conditions.

It was commonly done that way in the early PC days until it was noticed that the OS was a mandatory expense item and that a package deal could offer some price advantage over the separately obtained items as well as provide a convenience to the buyer.

There are a number of reasons, the most obvious one being the multiplicity of support requirements. The supplier's support facility has to handle a much wider range of questioning which is a cost that has to be considered as well as the likely lower level of customer satisfaction due to the support tech's likely loss of depth of understanding. If the same number of people buy a computer overall, some with linux and some with Windows, as would have bought strictly Windows machines otherwise, the supplier never gets back to even. I doubt that suppliers would like that situation. True, so what's the beef? HP does that, too.

At the end of the day, the totality of any deal that Microsoft may have made with the OEM is that the OEM gets a lower price based on an offer of exclusivity. That is only anti-compebreastive when it exceeds a fixed amount of the total market opportunity in an overall market. The DOJ trial failed to show that any such violation existed, even for desktop client platform software, which was Microsoft's monopoly product. To even get that much on the table, the judge had to throw out linux as a potential desktop compebreastor. Apple was thrown out by narrowing the spectrum to "Intel compatible processors". That left Microsoft with a monopoly, but only in a narrowly defined environment. Pay attention to the context, Bob. It was clear that the customer is paying for the overall package which included all the tangible items, too. Amend my statement to more clearly say "you are not JUST paying...you are ALSO paying...".