Presold OS's don't reflect the actual install base
Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 19, 2002 06:39 PM
This is a bit of a rehash from a few years ago when CTO's were unaware of Linux and BSD in the server room. It would be more than a little bogus to try to equate sales with installations.
It's darn near impossible to order machines without a pre-sold operating system from Redmond or elsewhere. They are simply not available in practice. All of the desktop machines I've seen or handled since 1986 have had PC/MS-DOS, MS-Windows or Macintosh OS pre-installed. In otherwords, with a pre-sold operating system.
Yet, in the last three years, none of the incoming desktop machines in my dept. were ever booted from the pre-sold operating system that came on the hard disk. Instead, the very first start was from a Debian/RedHat/Suse/YellowDog install CD each time. On paper that looks like 0% Linux. In reality it is 100%.
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Presold OS's don't reflect the actual install base
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 19, 2002 06:39 PMIt's darn near impossible to order machines without a pre-sold operating system from Redmond or elsewhere. They are simply not available in practice. All of the desktop machines I've seen or handled since 1986 have had PC/MS-DOS, MS-Windows or Macintosh OS pre-installed. In otherwords, with a pre-sold operating system.
Yet, in the last three years, none of the incoming desktop machines in my dept. were ever booted from the pre-sold operating system that came on the hard disk. Instead, the very first start was from a Debian/RedHat/Suse/YellowDog install CD each time. On paper that looks like 0% Linux. In reality it is 100%.
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