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Dell to Offer More Linux PCs
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Jul 26, 2007 11:52 PM
from the one-good-turn dept.
from the one-good-turn dept.
head_dunce writes "According to this article, Mark Shuttleworth from the Ubuntu camp says Dell is seeing a demand for the Linux-based PC and, "There are additional offerings in the pipeline." I'm starting to see flashbacks of the days when Microsoft partnered up with IBM to gain control of the desktop market. Will other Linux flavors find their way to the likes of Lenovo or HP, etc, or will Ubuntu claim the desktop market working with other PC manufacturers?"
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Advantage lost (Score:3, Interesting)
That massive discount Microsoft gives them over smaller OEMs is Dell's biggest competitive advantage. Now they'll have to compete more directly with local whitebox builders.
They don't have much choice though. The local box builders have already switched to Ubuntu as their OS of choice. Dell has to match them or be swamped.
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Advantage lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Advantage lost (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not aware of any?
Can you please elaborate?
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Informative)
Can you please elaborate?
Look in your local newspaper.
There'll be a dozen shopfront computer stores advertising pre-built computer systems. They build them in their backrooms and sell them to local families and businesses. Those guys pay wholesale prices of about AU$160.00 for Vista home premium, AU$320.00 for Office 2007 Standard and AU$50.00 for Norton Antivirus.
They can retail a Sempron/Ubuntu home or small office system for less than it costs them in wholesale MS/Antivirus licenses.
That's what Dell (and the second tier vendors) are scared of. If they drop the ball now, and let these little guys get a big enough foothold in the home/SME market, they could be in trouble.
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In the Minneapolis area there are still a number of boutique system builders. Walk in, pick out a motherboard, case, processor, memory, etc., and either take it home or watch them build it for you.
This i
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Actually, I would say a much larger advantage is that they have a good name. Businesses want to buy PC's that will work and that come ready to set up quickly. If you buy from Dell (or HP) you know that will be the case. Buy from others and you never kn
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "others" you mean a name randomly chosen from the Yellow Pages, yes. But if it's a local vendor who you can talk to and check his references, it becomes a much safer proposition, and a lot less hassle than dealing with an enormous company that makes you press a dozen buttons on your phone before you can speak to anyone, who is never the same person who you talked with before and so you have to explain your problem over and over again.
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
That massive discount Microsoft gives them over smaller OEMs is Dell's biggest competitive advantage. Now they'll have to compete more directly with local whitebox builders.
They don't have much choice though. The local box builders have already switched to Ubuntu as their OS of choice. Dell has to match them or be swamped.
And there was me thinking that Dell's biggest competitive advantages were its huge purchasing power on all components, not just operating systems, and its brand-name recognition.
I guess I was wrong. Who knew that Dell was paying the same price for CPUs, RAM, hard drives, etc that outfits run out of the owners' garages were paying?
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Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell might be able to get 10 percent on hardware?
If you think that the difference between the price that Dell pays for the average piece of hardware and the price that a one-man operation would pay for the same hardware is 10 percent then you're nuts.
Dell undoubtably buys directly from manufacturers. When it buys Intel CPUs, it buys them directly from Intel. When it buys Belkin accessories, it buys them directly from Belkin. When Dell buys, there's no middleman.
When a one-man operation buys Intel CPUs or Belkin accessories then it buys them from a distributor. There might be one, two or maybe even three such middlemen between it and Intel or Belkin. Each middleman takes a cut, which drives the price that the one-man operation pays for the products higher and higher. How much is that cut? Well, 10 percent per distributor would be a fair figure.
(If you want to get a fairer idea of distribution costs, take the cost per 1,000 units that is typically quoted regarding CPUs and compare that to the typical single unit street price. Allow a small (maybe 5-10 percent) profit for the vendor and you'll see that the distribution chain takes a fair chunk along the way.)
And all that's before you talk about how much of each product is bought by Dell. There's a big difference between maybe buying 5 CPUs a week through the channel and buying almost 200,000 a week directly from the manufacturer.
In 2006, Dell accounted for 16.1 percent of the 59 million PCs shipped worldwide. Last year, Dell shipped 950 million PCs.
Are you really telling me that you think that, with that sort of buying power, you don't think that Dell gets deals that give it a more than 10 percent hardware cost price advantage?
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Dell got a big discount on Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
Now: 80% discount on $0 is ....
The year of change (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose it was really inevitable in the long run, but I am happy to see the walls finally cracking.
Re:The year of change (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm guessing you're either a linux or mac fan. I have 2 copies of Vista running, one on my laptop and one on my desktop. Both work flawlessly. I have not experienced any problems with IE. I've used both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of IE without any prob
Re:The year of change (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
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There is no such thing as innovation stranglehold.
I'm not saying Microsoft will go away, but cross-platform compatibility
Not surprising... (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux wins the low-cost computing game (Score:5, Interesting)
The new $200 Asus EEE PC [wikipedia.org] could provide a big boost for Linux if it takes off. The price point makes it extremely attractive as a transportible second computer, and it could find some big markets in schools and universities.
Dell and Ubuntu (or other hardware manufacturers) could start a similar revolution in the desktop market with a very low cost and low specification machine. Especially if it is also compact and stylish.
Re:Linux wins the low-cost computing game (Score:5, Interesting)
More specifically, the $200 Asus EEE and things like Intel's Mobile Internet Device may bring in a new era of computer use. (The iPhone can be seen as part of that trend, btw - a small, mobile internet-capable machine; also the Nokia Tablet.) The goal should be an affordable (sub-$300) device with an attractive design, that people can use for email, social networking, web browsing, etc. It could take off among college students, for example. In fact this may be the exact goal of Intel's MID partnership with Ubuntu.
Re:Linux wins the low-cost computing game (Score:5, Funny)
Uhhh.. fuck off with your spin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is variety (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linux is variety (Score:5, Interesting)
I trust Mark. The guy transpires good faith. He's wasn't solely after money like Gates. He was the man with the vision (how long till we have nerd-cults dedicated to him?).
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Mandriva (Score:2, Interesting)
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1.They already had one with HP. They could not break into business accounts and it was limited to congigs that were of no interest to the average business. It was also not available in the most rabidly Microsoftic countries like the UK (yep, do we like it
preconfigure (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm so fed up of messing up xorg.conf and having to reconfigure it every time I reboot just to get video...
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No, a reboot is required much more often than a distro upgrade. An example of this would be a kernel security upgrade.
--
BMO
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In that case you must be updating some uns
Re:preconfigure (Score:5, Informative)
Since nvidia's 9xxx series of drivers, the graphical configuration utility allows you to hotplug monitors and set up dual head without touching xorg or even restarting the X server.
it's a bit disappointing that the feature isn't there for users of other cards, but it appears X is going through some big changes and hopefully soon enough it will hit the 21st century...
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Centos on former Ubuntu Dell (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a big fan of Dell home systems (their business machines are much better built), but having a major vendor support Linux is a good thing regardless. By them supporting Linux fixes can get pushed to other systems. The glitches in the Intel 3945 wireless card will be worked out. Maybe the Broadcoms start working without ndiswrapper. Heck, ATI might come around and make a proper video driver set.
I chose to buy this laptop precisely because the hardware is Linux compatible (well, except for the closed Nvidia drivers which are not too bad). If more people did this it gives an incentive for hardware manufacturers to release code and drivers for Linux. That helps everyone.
Thanks for the post! (Score:2)
A common API is the key (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as Unix/Linux people realise this and look beyond their own nose (ne: favourite flavour of GNU/Linux), they will realise that the API is the real jewel. The reason that Microsoft beat IBM at its own game with the OS2/Windows war was because it won the API war. They convinced, or scammed (depending upon your point of view) programmers to write to the Win31 API and OS/2 was killed. Providing development tools such as Visual Basic and Access which removed the whole API schema just made their task a whole lot easier.
Forget the fancy esoteric languages and "scripted" (ne: interpreted) tools, because they are not what is needed to wrestle the end user away from Windows. What is required is a common platform (display, communications, and file API's to name just a few). Sure, let the system level person choose between a Gnome or KDE desktop. Let them run either RedHat, Suse, or Ubuntu (insert flavour of the week) but provide a common interface to of them all via a simple and straight-forward API. Then provide the killer application development tools like Visual Basic and/or Access which will let newbie programmers write their killer app with no knowledge of computers or programming and then GNU/Linux may just stand a chance.
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