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Originally Posted by fjtorres
ACER seems flustered enough that the founder believes one thing--Surface is just to establish Win8 and will be dropped after it succeeds--and their European chief thinks it will fail altogether because of channel conflict alone, regardess of the quality of the product.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574...ol;editorPicks
In that view, it (apparently) isn't the quality of the software or the hardware that sells PCs, it is the partner OEM brand and anything without it is doomed to failure.  |
Dunno, I know a lot of people who refuse to buy anything that doesn't have a current version of Windows installed on it. Its mostly people who only know how to run Office and Internet Explorer, or are making some kind of stand on "standardization" of computers.
Surprisingly enough, a lot of teachers fall into this category. Its like they only know what they've been told, and have no academic curiosity outside their own field- but that's a long nasty rant and not really suitable for this thread.
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Ohhh-kaaayyy...
As to doing Linux alternatives, *all* the OEMs are doing it *now* and have been doing it for years. The ones complaining about MS undercutting and bypassing them have long tried to undercut and bypass MS for years.
One notable case was DELL who has repeatedly offered Linux variants... for a while but ends up dropping them because the demand is low and the support costs high enough to outweigh the license fee. The most recent try was with Ubuntu:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...buntu-PCs.html
Translation: "If you know how to maintain it we'll sell it to you."
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I'd wondered why Dell suddenly discontinued Ubuntu support.
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ASUS also tried it early in the Netbook era and the Windows-less netbooks *were* cheaper...because they came with cheaper hardware. Equally equipped, the ended up the same.
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They also had a particularly horrible Linux distro installed, too. Its use of UnionFS instead of a normal drive format meant you actually lost disk space if you tried to uninstall software. The base model also didn't have enough disk space to run the system updater; if you tried, you'd have to run the "recovery mode," which simply wiped the user partition.
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The thing is MS doesn't just give the OEMs a master disk and go away to count the money until the next release; MS provides the OEMs a lot of ongoing services and support--up to assuming all legal liability over Windows IP issues, which nobody does for Linux and Google refuses to do for Android licensees. Take those services away and the OEM has to do them inhouse. In most markets the cost of the services outweighs the Windows license fee or the *profits* from the desktop/laptop. (Servers are a different story.)
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How could there be any issues relating to someone using a licensed copy of Windows? Or any other OS? And what happened to the old saw from the '90s about "Windows is our only profitable product line"?
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The main exceptions are in some of the asian markets; most notably China.
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China has the only government that's been willing to stand up to MS' strongarm tactics. Instead of caving in and paying MS millions or even billions of dollars, they chose the rarely-exercised option of removing the software and finding something else. For an interesting read, have a look at the conversation between a Peruvian senator and MS over why Peru was switching to Linux from Windows. One of MS' main arguments was, "Without the OS, the computer won't run," like the computer couldn't run any OS but Windows.
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So, expect grumbling but no retaliation: MS already threw the OEMs a big bone--the assurance of feature and price parity.
In other words, they promised them that *if* they build tablets as good or better than Surface, they *won't* undercut them. Implied, of course, is that if they make too much of a fuss that *could* change.
The OEMs can't expect "loyalty" they never offered.
It's business, nothing personal. And the stakes for Win 8 are too high, as the ZDNet folks (above) have made all too clear: the entire non-iPad customer base is at stake.
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"I am altering our agreement; pray I won't alter it any further."