4 ms·
> I very much doubt that this is so because of > convenience: it is so because it gives more money > to Microsoft. When Microsoft was throwing its weight a
by pyre 14y ago
> I very much doubt that this is so because of
> convenience: it is so because it gives more money
> to Microsoft.
When Microsoft was throwing its weight around with OEMs to not offer alternative OSes, it was not because a handful of enthusiasts would have avoided paying an extra $35 on their computers. It was to make sure that alternative OSes remained a niche because they weren't hardware vendor supported.
That said, I've seen places with Microsoft shops would have wanted to avoid the 'Microsoft Tax.' I remember each machine in University had two Microsoft licenses. One that came with the purchase from Dell, and the other one purchased separately so that we could do more enterprise-y stuff with it. I'm sure that on a purchase of 1000s of desktops, avoiding $35/machine would have been nice.
- ygra 14y agoWorking at a semi-large-ish IT company here and the computers we buy come without any OS. So larger entities than a single person apparently have ways of purchasing large volumes of computers and avoiding buying OSes multiple times.
- pyre 14y agoI should have qualified that my experience was from ~2001 or so. I guess it's also possible that the person doing the purchasing was incompetent, or didn't care about the savings because it wasn't their money.
- ygra 14y agoThe latter may even be a valid reason. At least when universities here (Germany) are given a certain budget for certain things they have to use it up, lest they get less the next year. So there often is a rush at the end of the year to spend all remaining money on office supplies and other things that are not strictly necessary or need renewal, just to not get cuts the next year.