Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Mar 2007 22:13 UTC, submitted by Lord John
The OpenOffice Project has sent a letter to Michael Dell, showering praise on Dell's chairman and CEO and asking him to consider pre-loading OpenOffice onto PCs. The letter is the result of a flood of requests on Dell's online suggestion box, IdeaStorm, for Dell PCs pre-loaded with both Linux operating systems and the open-source suite of desktop productivity applications. John McCreesh, marketing project lead for OpenOffice.org, also asked Dell to consider making a financial contribution to the software's development.
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Member since:
2006-01-06
Dell is a Microsoft Office reseller. That means Microsoft gives them preferred pricing for reselling copies of Office (ie. Dell makes money on every copy of Office they can sell with a new machine). Now, of course, Dell could conceivably attempt to sell OpenOffice instead of MS Office, but (a) Dell's sales of MS Office are already profitable, (b) it's an unpredictable business model selling free software, (c) there's no evidence that there is significant/equivalent demand for OpenOffice from customers, (d) Microsoft provides support for Office products -- nobody is offering paid OpenOffice support (and Dell would need to provide that service somehow). I simply don't see how Dell can make an adequate business case for moving to OpenOffice unless it can address these issues first.