Slashdot gets it wrong….Again. or Debunking grand conspiracy theories.
For some sick reason I can't explain, I continue to read Slashdot even though I know that it is incredibly biased. Anyhow, yesterday they ran a story on yet another grand conspiracy titled "Stopping Linux Desktop Adoption Sabotage". So, I took the bait and read the article and as expected its biased, makes lots of incorrect assumptions and is pretty much inaccurate. I even wrote internal teams here to make sure that what I was reading wasn’t true.
Lets take a few of these and with a trivial amount of research and common sense prove the article wrong.
The first part of the article asks why buying a computer with a non Microsoft Windows operating system costs so much assuming "sabotage" from nefarious external forces. This one only needs common sense and a little bit of industry knowledge to refute.
There are two main sources of costs associated with manufacturing and selling computers
- The cost of the goods sold (Hardware, Software, etc)
- Support
One of these is pretty much fixed, the other can vary. Supporting additional operating systems increases the cost to the vendor, Someone has to pay for the user manuals, training customer support, qualifying systems and having multiple configurations. In the highly competitive computer market every dollar counts, you don’t want raise the price of your predominant line unless it raises profit by at least that much. It doesn't make business sense. Also of note, you know all that wonderful software that comes "bundled" with a new computer system? Various free ISP offers, free Music subscriptions and other various subscription software? Do you think the vendor does that for free? Nope, they create a significant amount of revenue. And guess what? They don’t get that revenue from non Microsoft Windows operating system installs as the software doesn’t run there. A certain large search company says each customer is worth approximately $35 a year after acquisition costs. So the pay the vendor a certain rate say $5 to install their software. Add in the kick back for AV, music services, printing, internet access and that’s a large amount of money that you can use to lower the price of the computer. Loose that stream of revenue, and it has to be built into the system cost.
The second one involves external accessories (NIC's, video cards, etc) again a pretty cut rate business. In the stores mentioned (Major consumer retailers) cost is everything, anything that raises your prices causes you to loose sales. What's the difference between a $19.95 nic and a $21.95 nic? Probably a few hundred thousand sales. If the cost of supporting a second OS outweighs the additional profit and loss of sales due to cost, you don’t do it. Again, simple business logic. Writing drivers costs money, there are no boogey men here. The author then goes on to tell a tale that a store manager of a chain heard that Windows requires royalty fees and repeats it without checking its validity. This one is real easy to refute information on WHQL testing can be found here. Basically, the only cost to get a driver qualified and signed is a good driver and $250. That’s right, $250 dollars for all OS's in a family (ie all XP releases are one family) There are no royalty payments and we even give the tests, tools and sample drivers away for free! The only reason for a vendor not to get a qualification is they don’t want to pay the costs of creating a driver that will pass the tests, or they want to install some sort of talking printer driver (don’t laugh:(, I have a printer I made this mistake with. "Time to order more ink from example.com" bleh) It's worth remembering that when buying hardware.
So in general, the article is pretty much wrong on just about every point, there is no evil outside force causing this, just simple economics.
Anyhow, these are just my opinion and not those of my employer, I'm just a lowly SDE who took a few econ classes in college, and know how to search on the web to find the facts.
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