[ On Thursday, February 21, 2002 at 16:43:31 (-0800), David Lawler Christiansen \(NT\) wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: IP: Wal-Mart PC, Operating System *Not* Included: $399 (fwd)
>
> To which "nefrious" (sic) business practices do you refer?  I'd never
> accuse MS of sainthood, but do bear in mind that at least 80% of what
> people say about the "Evil Empire" is pure speculation.

Every single one of the practices proven in the courts of the USA.  Read
Judge Jackson's briefs if you haven't already.  If I'm not mistaken
there have been some other judments handed out against M$ recently by
other judges too that revolve around not just nefarious, but down right
illegal business practices.  Perhaps soon we'll also have judgments from
courts in other jurisdictions too.  Maybe George W. Bush and his friends
can change the tunes sung by the courts, but I hope he'll have a much
harder time changing the facts recorded so far by history.

> AFAICT, anyone can offer PCs without an installed OS.

Yeah, they can try.  And these days it might even be possible to carve a
little niche in the marketplace doing so, and I suppose Wallmart might
be a wonderful test case to see if this is true or not.  I only hope
they succeed and that their success spreads to other retailers.

Meanwhile when your CPU supplier, motherboard suppliers, and pretty much
everyone else you buy components from (even some of the suppliers of the
networking gear you might use to link your systems together with), leads
you down the garden path and tells you you'll have to use M$-Windows for
some stuff no matter what you might wish, and indeed some of them even
give you very strong incentives to pre-install M$-Windows on your PC,
well then you're going to find it pretty damn hard to offer machines
without pre-installed M$-Windows on them aren't you?  Not to mention
that all your bigger competitors have defined the market as including
pre-installed M$-Windows and your hands are pretty much tied.

I can't even easily configure my network hubs and switches any more
without either running ancient software that does not support the newer
hardware modules; or running the sole M$-Windows supported version, and
that _really_ irks me, especially given that the name on that gear is of
a company once thought to be a strong competitor to M$ in many ways.  My
network gear vendor simply dropped support for the non-M$-Windows
versions of their configuration software, without explanation and
without making the old version freely available in any form after E.O.L.
Obviously I'm never going to run any M$ software (except maybe my
emergency officially licenced MS-DOS boot diskette), so I'm going to
have to figure out how to configure my network devices the hard way.

>  However, when you
> build and sell PCs on the scale that the likes of (example) Dell and
> Gateway do, the big question becomes whether it's worth the investment
> given the potential payoff.

So you (or at least the company owning the domain you posted from) would
like to have us believe -- the problem is that even the big guys are
under forms of pressure from their suppliers (eg. the BIOS authors, the
likes of Intel, and so on).  M$ has made it more costly for the likes of
Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, and so on to offer OS-free PCs because
they've encouraged many of the component suppliers to give better
support and maybe even better pricing for single-platform drivers, etc.
Even specifications are withheld unless you're a member of a certain
"club" (er, consortium, association, etc.).

Maybe Wallmart will prove you wrong.

Finally since Judge Jackson's rulings there have been a few of the
Dell's and so on offering pre-installed Linux, though some of them have
just as quickly stopped such offerings too, giving very poor excuses as
to why.  Even Intel et al seem to have finally conceeded to putting some
meager Linux support into IPMI for their server platforms.  (We'll
likely never know who did the pushing and who did the resisting for
that, especially since IPMI is supposedly still a secret specification.)

>  In the Client OS world, most users don't
> want to dabble with choosing an OS-- they buy a Mac (and expect MacOS)
> or they buy a PC (and expect Windows).  

Once upon a time there was a choice for OS for your clone too.  I
remember those days very distinctly.  I remember the times before M$-DOS
2.x came out.  It seemed like not much later when suddenly it was
pre-installed everywhere, with the little guys forced to follow the lead
of Compaq.  Soon all the suppliers we bought clones from suddenly
couldn't find distributors for the other OSs.  Even IBM once offered at
least two choices on their PCs (i.e. OS/2) [and of course now they
finally offer several OS choices again on their iAPX86 server platforms].

I believe that in the end the personal computer industry really won't be
a free and open market until either somone wins and well all end up
running the same software, or until all hardware is sold independent of
operating system and application software and only third-party vendors
offer operating systems and/or applications.  I don't mind at all
bundling OS and apps -- not even if they are tightly integrated -- just
so long as the hardware vendors are forced by law to sell the software
with a separate, visible, sticker price.  The only cost that's fair to
hide in the bundle price is the cost of performing the bundling service
(pre-install of the customer's chosen software, configuration, etc.).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>