Dell Recommended" 11268
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Well, that's fine, I guess. I'll stipulate that marketing is about meeting the customer's needs, it is sales that's about bullpoo.
But I think this was about whether or not XP Home was "free" or paid for when included in the price of the machine. You tried to divert it into product marketing.
I don't think $500 is "loose change" for most people, and what started this thread is the fact someone claimed that adding XP Pro and Office to a Windows computer to make it do something useful was priced at about that level.
Even if you pay retail for a Linux distro and StarOffice you pay much less than that and has comparable functionality.
Not always. Dell does sell computers with no installed OS and all the time I buy PC-104 boards that have no OS installed. The OS does not *have* to be bundled. It could easily be priced separately and it was done that way for a while before MS started making exclusive deals with OEMs.
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...
There's no reason the buyer can't be given a choice of OS even if you take it as a given that some OS needs to be preinstalled.
Except that Dell also pre-installs Linux. So for at least some buyers Linux must satisfy the requirements.
billwg ... Perhaps from places like here: "Early in the '90s, Microsoft's drastically improved graphical user interface-based operating system, Windows 3.1, tempted many away from the company's existing text-based...
For some reason they have chosen to limit Linux to server systems, even though there's clearly a market for desktop Linux. It is smaller than the Windows market, but it exists. I'm sure this neglect has nothing to do with Dell's relationship with Microsoft though, as that would be anti-compebreastive behavior and might get someone into trouble.
You're playing games with words by pretending that they're giving you the parts for free and only charging for labor. I find it amusing that you think anybody will buy that.
-- - Bob Hauck - A proud member of the reality-based community.