According to the blog of ever increasing entropy, HP have decided to kill off it’s FreeDesktop based Mi netbook on the same day that Microsoft Windows 7 came out.
In a way this is both surprising and not surprising to me.
It’s a surprise because I never figured Hewlett Packard for being this spineless and cretins. Throwing away large sums of development money in order to help short term OEM deals with Microsoft? Well sure, HP might be in pain from OEM contract terms from Microsoft Windows and it might make business sense this quarter. But surely someone in HP must have a sore arse, or are they all cowering behind their “good for business” mantra which must be fairly strong to protect them from doing the right thing for their future business.
Now I’m not surprised that the Mi with Ubuntu pre-installed has ended. Yes that’s right folks, it was Ubuntu and it was even developed by Canonical on behalf of HP. They paid a pretty penny to have their own interface and customizations put into the OS.
But look at what they did, they rejected the idea of including the Ubuntu brand with their shipments. The only mention that it was a FreeDesktop at all comes from a note about it being “Linux based” (whatever that means these days).
There is a mutually beneficial arrangement when it comes to brand marketing in the community. Dell sells machines with Ubuntu on them and both Dell and the Ubuntu community benefit from that arrangement. Instead of my LoCo group marketing Ubuntu for just old machines that came with Windows, I could safely point people at Dell and let them buy new computers complete with Ubuntu. Dell benefits because they get customers from the community advocacy and the community gets a big well known OEM to give it credibility and a partner that can ship working systems for cheap.
But HP didn’t want that, they wanted to control the branding of the OS and it’s not a surprise that they didn’t get many people from the Ubuntu community recommending their products. It’s not a surprise that every time someone said “Lets get me an Ubuntu machine” they went to Dell instead of HP.
Which is shame, because HP’s printer division is a much better collaborator. And most of my LoCo peers recommend HP printers simply because we can be almost pretty assured that no matter which one is bought, it’ll work.
So to get back to Microsoft, they’ve shaped the market to make Windows more attractive than it would be on a level playing field, they’ve manipulated OEMs to such a degree that it makes a mockery of anti-competition laws. If you’ve got any doubt of the reasons why bug #1 has to be fixed, it’s because we shouldn’t have to put up with this reduction in fair competition.
If I were dictator of the world, I’d tax any desktops shipped without a FreeDesktop dual boot.
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