Call me cynical but the decision that Dell has taken - to offer Ubuntu installed on some of its PCs and laptops - is driven by just one thing - money. Or at least the hope of making money.
Let’s remember that Dell did this Linux thing once before - it went big on Red Hat in the year 2000, offering the distribution on a similar number of machines, and then promptly quit doing so a year later. Reason? The accountants weren’t happy.
Look at some of the statements Michael Dell made at Linuxworld in San Jose, California, that year: “We’re making it easy for customers to get Linux from Dell. The only thing growing faster than Linux is the number of Linux systems Dell is shipping - shipments of Red Hat Linux increased 500 percent year on year.
“Dell is now the No. 2 provider of Linux-based systems worldwide and the first major manufacturer to offer Linux across its full product line. Dell has prepared for wide-scale Linux adoption by investing more engineering resources to Linux than to any other operating system. We’re doing this to make it easy for our customers to run Linux; configurations of all Dell products are now designed, tested and certified for Linux. Our factories can now customize each system - from PCs to servers - with Linux.”
No wonder the US of A is the number one generator of greenhouse gases - speeches like this which are so full of hot air make a major contribution.
Michael Dell’s decision to sell Ubuntu is driven by one thing - he’s hoping to get ahead of HP on this one. Having been beaten into second place by HP on PC sales last year, he’s had to come back to the company and take the reins.
If he was hoping that Windows Vista would sell as fast as the people in Redmond were projecting and give him a little more spare cash, he has had to adjust to reality very sharply. The only reason he’s been able to continue to offer XP on Dell is because the cash register isn’t ringing - if it were a political decision, Microsoft would have had him by the crown jewels.
But when it means that money isn’t coming in, even Microsoft has to sit by and watch. After all, the Redmond company has made no secret that its aims are simple -Â extracting every stray rupee, kopek, dollar, pound, mark, euro, shilling, dirham and dinar from pockets worldwide.
Vista sales are slow, no matter what spin Microsoft puts on it. The hardware requirements are a bit too onerous and too heavy on the pocket. And then there’s the little matter of DRM.
Anyone’s who’s thinking of Dell as the saviour of Linux, think again. If those machines on which Ubuntu is installed fail to sell in big enough numbers to justify the decision commercially, then Michael Dell will bid goodbye and move on to his next tryst. All the shouting by angst-ridden geeks won’t even register on his decibel counter.
There need be no fear about Ubuntu running properly on Dell machines. The Ubuntu team and Dell engineers will take care of that; it’s easy when you can customise machines at the source. And in this case, both software and hardware can be tweaked before the boxes are sent to the point of sale. If people can get Windows to install properly, then installing Linux will be a breeze. And you won’t end up finding out that you have bad hardware a few months down the road - Linux does enough stress testing during the installation and simply refuses to run if hardware is defective.
Canonical, the owner of Ubuntu, will be definitely contributing plenty of cash to the venture to ensure that it succeeds. Of course, if you ask Mark Shuttleworth about it, he’ll come up with some cute statement or the other like he did last time. At times, being sharp means one can end up cutting one’s own self - that’s something which Shuttleworth will learn about in the long run.
If Dell is to succeed, it will need to create demand for the Linux boxes it plans to sell. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts - simply because in the past, according to Register journo Ashlee Vance, Microsoft has been willing to allow Dell to meet demand, not create it. “Microsoft told OEMs to ‘meet demand but not help create demand’ where Linux was concerned,” Vance writes; he is the only journalist who did not have stars in his eyes when commenting on Dell’s decision.
It will take only a couple of quarters in the US business cycle before Dell’s future (or lack thereof) with Ubuntu is known. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu-Dell deal is only effective in the US. The chances of success are thus more limited than if Dell were going into other markets.
The hardware makers who will be watching this experiment will be the smaller companies. Lenovo can do what it wants - and does so. It is a Chinese company and sells Red Flag Linux to customers who want it. The days when an American company dictated terms to a Chinese firm have more or less ended and Lenovo knows this only too well.
HP has long had an interest in Debian - its chief Linux technical officer Bdale Garbee was once a leader of the Debian project - and recently announced that it had made $US25 million by offering support for the distribution in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The customers are all either small or medium-sized businesses or governments. HP is now the number one PC vendor.
If Dell and Ubuntu succeed, it will change the entire scenario for computing. I have my doubts that the marriage will last but this time I would love to be proven wrong.
