Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness

Yes DELL are advertising Linux on DELL on Google, but when you go to the DELL page there is no indication that Linux is even an option. I rang DELL Australia today (actually it's DELL Malaysia, but that's close enough for a Yank company, at least they are in the same general area of the world), and I was offered DELL precisions (didn't ask the price I was looking at Laptop prices) and the M65 Precision Laptop without an operating System - the M65 Laptop is $AU2989.80 with no OS, not exactly a home user priced commodity. M1025 and similar series laptops, aimed at the home user market, with Windows Vista are $AU1000 cheaper.

I think that when the dust settles, DELL's self defeating Linux marketing strategy will "prove" once again that Linux doesn't sell computers.

The way DELL has set up the marketing of Linux, you have to be seriously in the know, and be looking for Linux. No ordinary home user will buy DELLs with Linux preinstalled, simply because they won't know the option is available, and the DELL attitude, from what I can tell, after talking to their salesmen, is, "take it or leave it, that's the deal."

Uhm.... Dell's Linux strategy hasn't been announced yet. What they are selling now is the same stuff they've been selling the last couple of years. Not to say that they cannot come up with a Linux strategy that will fail, but I am going to give Dell the benefit of the doubt here and only comment on it after the strategy has been revealed.