[ubuntu-uk] [SALES PITCH ]Dell hardware and Ubuntu.

[Mark Harrison]

Nik,

Thanks for making this offer. I'm not in the slightest opposed to you 
making a percentage if it means that I (we?) get a cheaper price than I 
could have gotten by going direct.

One of the things I found irritating about the US Dell offer was that 
the PCs were the same price, whether they came with Vista or Ubuntu.

Under those circumstances, the "pragmatic" thing most people new to 
Ubuntu would be tempted to do would be to buy a Vista PC, and install 
Ubuntu on it, either as a dual boot, or as an only O/S (but secure in 
the knowledge they had a "Dell Vista restore disk" to fall back on.) 
This may be the pragmatic thing to do, but it distorts the market 
figures, and makes Dell believe that there is a smaller Ubuntu market 
than there really is :-(

There seem to be three reasons Dell might expect to charge the same price:

1: Bloatware on Windows. While we hate it, the revenue that Dell gets 
from it exceeds the Windows licencing cost, so that effectively the 
bloatware manufacturers are providing Windows for free for us :-) Now 
that Dell have reduced the amount of bloatware they ship, these 
economics are changing.

2: A belief that Ubuntu will be costly on the part of Dell to support, 
since they'll have to retrain staff in it. (My own experience of running 
IT teams, by the way, is that many of them, even in Windows-only work 
environments are linux users, and would jump at the chance to support 
linux in the office!)

3: A belief that many PCs sold with Linux end up with pirated copies of 
Windows installed on them. I'm afraid that I know many people who run 
pirated Windows, sometimes knowingly, sometimes in the belief that 
they've bought a legitimate licence from a computer fair!

If you could impress upon your contacts at Dell that:

- Ubuntu-UK is willing and able to provide technical support to people!
- Many of us genuinely want a Linux PC, and not a set of "Windows ready" 
hardware :-)

Regards,

Mark



Nik Butler wrote:
> [ SALES PITCH ]
>
> As many may already be aware Dell will be shipping Ubuntu preinstalled
> kit to the UK market.
>
> I am  ( to the best of my knowledge ) uniquely positioned to have a very
> long term working and purchasing arrangement with Dell on behalf of all
> my customers. Depending on the models and volumes I can usually arrange
> a good margin on the order value ( read discount ).
>
> I will be posting some quotes and thoughts about this range tomorrow as
> well and if people are interested in a collective buying power position
> then I will be happy to mediate ( of course for a small percentage ) .
>
> Dell are really committed to supporting Ubuntu on their product lines
> and now is the opportunity to show an interest and a commitment to
> helping them deliver and generate a productive revenue stream in our
> market.
>
> I will of course be blogging about this as well and detailing any offers
> I can provide at the time , including how to buy and what sort of
> support we can expect in terms of hardware. 
>
> Thanks for taking time to read and heres looking forward to tommorow
> when Freedom comes to the European and UK markets.
>
>
> Nik Butler