Dell No Longer Selling Systems w/o Microsoft OS 1159
UPDATES
1. Effective 8/26 - New Microsoft contract rules stipulate that we can no longer offer the "NO OS" option to our customers beyond September 1st. As such all customers currently purchasing a "NO OS" option on either OptiPlex, Precison or Latitude for the express purpose of loading a non-MS OS will have the following options:
1. Purchase a Microsoft OS with each OptiPlex, Precision or Latitude system.
2. For OptiPlex and Precision - purchase one of the new "nSeries" products (offered for GX260, WS340 & WS530 - details in the attached FAQ) that are being created to address a different OS support requirement other than a current standard Microsoft OS.
We must have all "No OS" orders shipped out of the factory by September 1st. The "No OS" legend code and SKUs will be I-coded on 8/19 and D-coded on August 26th to ensure shipment of orders prior to September 1st. FYI - this effects all of our competitors as well.
If you want a notebook w/o an OS (Score:2, Informative)
BYOS! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This stinks, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Opt out (Score:2, Informative)
Its interesting, I wonder how long before M$ requires pcs to have windows (ie.. making the bios only to boot into windows or freeze if no windows installed, etc.. it can be done)
may never happen, or it may happen tommorrow.. or M$ might turn out like Worldcom (wouldn't that be interesting?)
the judge will not know (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is that all testimony has already been taken.
It is just like the stupid decision by the appellate court that Microsoft did not try to monopolize the browser market. That was clearly incorrect but the court is strapped with the evidence in the case as of the testimony. And as of years earlier, Microsoft only acheived about a 50% market share. And, with those facts before the appellate court, you are likely to get such an opinion.
However, when the AOL case gets to the jury, facts will be completely different. Then 90-95% will be evidence. Very different indeed.
That is a basic problem with the legal system and it is why Microsoft lawyers can lie in public the way they do. Microsoft lawyers lie to the press and to the public based upon old facts that are clearly no longer relevant. But, to the ignorant, it is a sale.
Funny, however, that Microsoft again starts to lie about having a monopoly.
But, they are just a bunch of cheap liars anyway. They have proven that numerous times.
Remember the idiot under oath who told the judge that SUNs JVM was not included with XP because of the GPL?
And, remember the idiot that told the judge that Microsoft will withdraw from the market if it does not like the judgment?
And, remember the three stouges that each claimed they thought removing icons had something to do with commingled code.
Microsoft's lies are not even credable and yet they spit them out to defraud consumers. And, the judges as it turns out.
Probably does not include servers. (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't receive the e-mail, but the snippet above does not mention servers and they are usually handled differently.
Re:Dude, you're getting a Mac (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I shouldn't poke fun. They sell Lindows PC's, Mandrake PC's, and just plain no-OS machines. It's kind of neat, and kind of scares me that they're offering something better than Dell and Gateway in those respects.
Re:Monopoly (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS was a very user freindly OS, but thanks to practices such as these ones, it never got into any OEM products(though the OEMS wanted them, but Microsoft sent their lawyers around to fix that)
Re:BE did file the lawsuit. (Score:4, Informative)
But, all the law suits have not finished yet.
Actually, only the Bristol and Caldera suits have finished. And, I am not sure about Bristol. Caldera got $150 million. Bristol got 1 million in punitive damages assigned by the judge. And, in that case, Microsoft lawyers had to be enjoined from lying about the decision in the case.
Of course, lawyers always try to spin the decision to make them look less incapable. But, it is rare for a judge to issue an injunction to shut the damn lying lawyers up. For Microsoft, it is necessary.
Just today Microsoft began to lie again about its monopoly status.
When will the idiots learn?
SUN thinks a billion in damages is close to a cake walk. They might be right. And, I think AOL (Netscape) could get 10 billion or more in damages.
To be honest, Microsoft is so corrupt and dishonest they may never reform. But, paying out 10 big ones will wake up a few stockholders who just assume that lying is the way to make the most money.
Re:Why does buying a new computer... (Score:2, Informative)
Because almost all PC's with Windows preinstalled (whether from Dell or from white box manufacturers) ship with OEM licences. These licence you to run the software on the hardware it was sold on, and no other. They cost about half the price of a full retail licence, but when you replace the machine you have to buy a new license.
At work, we prefer to buy machines without an OS, and then buy full-price Microsoft licenses, so we have the flexibility to upgrade hardware and software independently. Doing it this way the licenses cost more, but you're less likely end up throwing them away...
Re:I see this two ways.... (Score:3, Informative)
No they don't [billparish.com]. M$ pays **NO** federal taxes (and no, I am not making this up).
Re:This is what essentially killed Be (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
Tell that to the DR-DOS people. When MS-DOS was lagging behind and DR-DOS was picking up steam, Microsoft issued a beta version of Windows 3.x which was coded to randomly lock up when run on DR-DOS. And what do you know? Corporate IT managers soon started to realize that running Win3.x on DR-DOS was a bad idea. (This episode was later settled out of court with undisclosed payments by Microsoft.)
Tell that to WordPerfect, who had to sue to to get Microsoft to reveal secret APIs in Windows which made Microsoft Word run faster than WordPerfect. Though WordPerfect prevailed, the damage was done -- for a good period of time MS Word was faster due to this API chicanery, which obviously hurt WordPerfect's market share.
One can make a very strong case that Microsoft's monopoly was gained/created with illegal tactics, but, of course, the pro-corporate Republocrats/Demopublicans in Washington decided not to purse that anti-trust angle.
How soon we forget. Time to read your history...
'No OS' still an option for servers. (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a link to one of their server config menus. [dell.com]
On the menu is Win2k, Netware and no OS. So MS doesn't have the strength to do this on servers as they do on desktops. That would be my conclusion, as they'll only do whatever they can for their own profit - consumers be damned.
Re:Dude, you're getting a Mac (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's a shame... (Score:3, Informative)
What kind of Econ-101 textbook did this come from? Maybe "exploiting economies of scale" is important to some business professor, but real businesses are in business for one reason: to make money. Lots of money.
Whence the term capital-ism?
In any event, I don't care about the motivations of the individual participants within capitalism, I'm talking about why capitalism works.
Using capital more efficiently is based on the idea that the business people are motivated by society's greater good.
No, you're thinking of community-ism (communism). Again, I'm talking practical application, not motivation.
While I don't particularly like greed, history has shown that the economic system based on greed has worked much better than the one based on society's greater good.
I'm a pragmatic individual: if being a money-grubbing bastard tends to improve society overall (and except for a few notable cases, it does), then go for it.
Re:Monopoly (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
Unless the corporation in question is Shell Nigeria. [essentialaction.org]
Another addition to your suggested spec (Score:2, Informative)
Do you suppose there would be enough money left to spec out RAID support on the motherboards, and double up on everyone's drives? (I'm talking RAID 1 here, by the way).
After all, with the exception of laptop computers, the thing that breaks not-quite-as-often as Windows itself are the hard drives -- seems like, Dell or no dell, RAID support on workstations is a boon. Being able to swap a dead drive out during the evening after a failure, without the workstation operator noticing anything was wrong during the day, rocks.
And the only way I know of (please correct me if I'm wrong) to get hardware RAID (please note I said hardware, not software) is by spec'ing a Dell (or equivalent) server as a workstation...or building your own.
What do you think?
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
This matters only for criminal liability. The bigger issue is that monopolies are (for the most part) illegal by law, not in order to punish the successful, but to protect the consumer (read Adam Smith, or be a computer user
MS PREVENTED DR-DOS from running windows (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I see this two ways.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just so people know how this works... (Score:3, Informative)
Dell has dropped all their OS-less machines, and now only offer machines with M$-OS pre-installed, at an increased price which can't be negotiated away. Even for their largest customers. Even for corporations with site-license agreements with M$. All because M$ used a carrot-and-stick approach, threatening to remove all discounts unless non-OS options disappeared, and offering a greater discount than H-Paq if they went with a 100% M$ offering.
Dell is fucking freaked by the HP-Compaq merger, HPaq is a giant more scary than even M$. Although everyone in the press is laughing about the mis-match of HP and fuckPaq, Dell and IBM aren't laughing. H-Pucker is huge, and will (already started to) create a nasty price war in the corporate PC industry. One of HPricks competitors is going to go out of business, and you can be sure IBM will most likely survive. So M$ hit Dell hard in the negotiations a few months ago, and now we see the results; make every corp client pay twice for M$ products, or lose the war before even being able to fire a shot.
Doh!ll caved in, and probably are spinning this to their share holders as a great oportunity to increase profit margins over HPhuq.
The sad reality is that there are now lots of corporate clients on M$ license 6.0, where they have already paid per-seat/per-user/per-cockroach for copies of M$-OS. Then when they look at the $$$ amount from Dell, and the same spec machines from and IBM or H-dreck, the costs of that "Pay twice for your OS with every machine" are going to look pretty bad. Dell has phucked themselves over bad this time around, you can bet they aren't going to see any long term profits from this move. The boycott from a very tiny percentage of free-OS freaks isn't going to make a blip in their books, but 50K+ corporations jumping ship in the next 3 years will kill them.
As a very astute industry insider predicted wednesday night over a few beers, "that bitch Carlie may have killed the old HP, but if she secretly carved up the PC market with Bill, then Dell has been doomed from the start"
the AC
Re:I see this two ways.... (Score:2, Informative)
Slash meme (Score:2, Informative)
But I do know from reading Michael Abrash's article in Doctor Dobb's Journal about the AARD code, how Microsoft used it with Win3.1 to hurt DRDOS, and how that code *is still in production Win3.1*, just de-activated. Read the article and you'll find just how convoluted a mess they went through to find a meaningless incompatiblity in an undocumented area of an otherwise perfectly compatible competitve OS.
I also know about the release of Win3.11, (Not Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but plain Win3.11) which was done just to tank OS/2 for Windows. Oh, they fixed an obscure math bug in the calculator, too. But they left another obscure bug. When you subtracted 3.1 from 3.11 to find the difference between the two versions, the answer was 0.
You can make any claim about ease of installation and quality of products you wish. I won't necessarily deny them. But you simply CANNOT make the claim that Microsoft has exclusively competed fairly in the marketplace. That is just plain untrue. Don't forget that they have been found guilty of illegal monopolist activities in a court of law, for that matter.
What Dell says on it's web site .. (Score:1, Informative)
"Operating system software runs the basic functions of a PC. It controls the user interface, instructs the PC on how to interact with internal and external peripherals, and handles networking with other computers. Dell offers several versions of Microsoft® Windows® operating systems to meet the needs of different users.
It's important to have the appropriate Microsoft Windows operating system factory-installed on your new DellTM system. That way, you are assured that the components and drivers are tested for compatibility and installed correctly. Set-up is minimal - you just boot up and go."
So, they're selling "assurance" that everything works. Sounds like more FUD to me, but people buy into it regularly.
See here and click on "Learn more" about Windows OS:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/minicat_
Re:Monopoly Bill Gates is Hitler (Score:2, Informative)
In April, 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality. However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany after the First World War. This was reflected in the growth in the German Social Democrat Party (SDP), the largest political party in Germany.
Hitler, therefore redefined socialism by placing the word 'National' before it. He claimed he was only in favour of equality for those who had "German blood". Jews and other "aliens" would lose their rights of citizenship, and immigration of non-Germans should be brought to an end. (link [schoolnet.co.uk])
Re:Don't forget Lotus 1-2-3 (Score:1, Informative)