A guy I know at Symantec told me that Dell (in common with other volume box shifters) receive a subsidy from the suppliers of products such as AV, firewalls, etc which they pre-install on the windows boxes. The logic here is that the punter will normally sign up to use the pre-installed "freebie" when the initial licence period expires. Thus the third party company (Symantec or whatever) gains market share while the box shifter gets a subsidy.

There is not a mature enough "market" in such products in the Linux world so we end up with the anomalous situtation where a Linux installation actually costs the box shifter money - despite the cost of the MS install.

Mick

From: MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop Subject: Re: [ALUG] Asus Eee pc 4G To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Message-ID: 475d4a23.4BrVmz4rdyG4m5/F%mjr@phonecoop.coop Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Barrys linux mail bazubuntumail@tiscali.co.uk wrote:

...

Dell now do linux machines maybe others will follow.

I've read (and I think I checked when a family friend was after a new laptop) that it's cheaper to buy a Dell Windows machine of the same spec than to buy one of their Ubuntu machines. Also, you can try for the Windows tax refund.

So, that makes me wonder if Dell are either:- a. market-testing the gullibility of Ubuntu users; b. looking to say "well, demand wasn't as high as predicted" when they accept the Microsoft shilling to become an exclusively Windows vendor.

Paranoid or experienced?