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You're confused about who operating system customers are. Let me enlighten you: OEMs are OS customers, not consumers. Consumers buy WHOLE COMPUTERS, not operating systems. OEMs account for 99% of all OS sales/installs, and OEMs are free to sell whatever they like to consumers. They aren't bound by Microsoft in any way. You would think that Linux would be more attractive to OEMs, but they can't seem to sell Linux -- even when it's priced at zero. Sure, blame the OEM, if you like, but don't try to argue that the market isn't free. You just don't like the fact that the market backed a different product. "

OEMs are indeed customers for Microsoft licensing. OEMs receive a huge "discount" from Microsoft for the price that they pay to Microsoft for each license, provided that they offer Windows exclusively. Retail outlets are subjected to similar deals.

A good example is in the story of netbooks. Initially, these were sold only with Linux (Xandros was a very poor choice of Linux distribution, but it was nevertheless Linux). XP was being withdrawn at the time, and Vista wouldn't run on the machines. Other manufacturers started to build similar machines (but somehow they all had very poor Linux distributions, mostly from Linux vendors who had signed a deal with Microsoft, and all of which were either "locked down" or had only very sparsely populated repositories. Hmmm. Where was an unconstrained, open Debian or Ubuntu model? Why did many have closed-source-driver-only wireless chips?).

Within a few months, once the netbooks had begun to sell in significant numbers, Microsoft brought XP Home out of mothballs. They allowed OEMs to put XP on newer model netbooks (which suddenly had hard drives added to their design in order to accomodate XP) at a bargain basement price provided Linux was not offered on the same model.

In my area, and as far as I know it happened all over the world in a similar fashion, one week you could buy Linux netbooks in retail stores, and the very next weekend you couldn't. Not a one for sale. Hmmmm. Remarkable that all that stock just disappeared overnight, no?

After a while, Microsoft even began to set hardware limits on netbooks. How does Microsoft get to do this?? Microsoft don't make the hardware! They get to do this by saying that they will not give OEMs that "discount" price if their netbooks exceed the stipulated specifications.

Retail stores and OEMs are NOT free to sell whatever they like to consumers. Not if they also want to sell Windows at a competitive price.

This is why you get a few vendors who sell Linux only, and the majority of vendors who sell Windows only.

http://www.zareason.com/shop/home.php
http://www.system76.com/

Zareason and System 76 don't get any "discounted price" for selling Windows licenses, because they sell Ubuntu. Zareason and System76 couldn't sell a Windows machine as an alternative, because its price would be horrendous.

This way, you just don't get any machines with an Ubuntu OS pre-installed in the same brick-and-mortar store sold side-by-side with Windows machines with the exact same hardware.

Consumers don't get to do any such a side-by-side hands on comparison. Consumers don't get any choices offered to them.

Edited 2009-11-04 04:23 UTC