Robert Pogson

I received a bit of spam today. It contained a blurb from Dell,

“Dell has embarked on upgrading its 100,000 clients to Windows 7. 85% are upgrading from XP. Learn their experiences and the improvement they have seen in better data and network protection, reduced help desk calls and the ability to image a system on the fly in half the time it took on XP. “

I went on to read a two-page summary of the reasoning and results expected and I was amused. They had only made a trial of Vista and realized it was not for them. Then when “7″ came along, they took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

What were they thinking? That “7″ would solve the problems of XP and Vista, both products of M$? What of the next layer of problems? and the next after that? They wanted increased manageability, performance and reduced costs so they rushed out and sent M$ $10 million or more to reduce costs. How sad. They could have had all the benefits and kept their money by switching to GNU/Linux. Did they even think of it? Instead of innovating and setting an example for the benefit of customers, they conspire with M$ to exploit the addictions of the customers. Sick.

They could have switched to thin clients from GNU/Linux terminal servers for the ultimate in manageability, security and low cost. The few whose workload was not amenable to thin client technology could run GNU/Linux on thick clients or servers, if they needed more power. The speed of reconfiguration that they boasted would now be as little as hours could be minutes with thin clients.

Dell has shown some independence from M$ in the past but here they are suckling again. Wasn’t Vista enough? Wasn’t the malware and re-re-rebooting enough? What will it take to wake Dell up to the reality that M$ is not their friend?