Crazy Days

Dell to ship Linux...Checkout the Numbers

Wow finally this is happening...at least/hopefully will happen in the future. For the longest time I was obsessed with Dell laptops and desktops as a brand for no particular reason. Yet I was also annoyed by the fact that they didn't have a non-Windows/PC-DOS/Linux versions of their laptops on the online portal. This was brought up in several encounters with Dell representatives, and they took it pretty cool and agreed that is something should be looked at, but that was just a marketers promise which was never kept.

For some time there were rather rumers and then announcements on the Dell web site about Dell shipping with Linux (or rather OS free machines). For a moment I though this is cool and then slowly started looking at the situation from another perspective, and realized that this is not gonna cost a bang.

I always believed and still believe that, the best way to take Linux to common users are through enterprises. From what I've seen most of the common users (like my wife) use a home PC to continue their IT life at office from home. They prefer to have the same email client, the Word processors and not to mention the Operating System as well. This remain a barrier on Linux adoption in most of the situations. Besides enterprise computing is far superior in numbers compared to home computers (at least from my experience).

The latest move with dell is really targeting the household market or the home computing sector, which has already decided on Ubuntu. This move brings to my mind that vendors are most of the times one step behind the cutting edge. Two years ago I could've agreed on this move since Linux was not really enterprise ready, but today Linux is fully enterprise ready, although Ubuntu might not be the best selection, but there are other alternatives. In fact as one blog explains, if the numbers are correct Dell is expecting a market share of maximum 1% of there total sales volumes, which is 20k units, so we can expect the total number of computers to ship with Linux to be around 200, which indeed is a insignificant adoption. After seeing the numbers I feel, is this something to blog about...

On the other hand for enterprise markets Dell should've shipped with Novell SLED or RedHat Enterprise Desktop (I haven't seen RH), which is really enterprise ready, and I believe enterprises are ready to accept these as well. I fear this has rather become a chicken and egg situation for the enterprise adoption.

Anyway now I can buy my next laptop with Ubuntu....if it ever going to be Dell. Or I rather divert my crusade towards another vendor when I'm in touch with the corporate world once again.