Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

While not huge in the grand scheme of things, Dell has probably been the biggest vendor of Ubuntu machines, mostly in India and other poor countries. For $2 billion Microsoft gets to tell them to kill any such Ubuntu or Android product line-ups, and any research involving them. How is this good for Dell itself as a company, especially with the Windows/PC market going down? Is Dell really letting Microsoft turn them into another Nokia?

View on HN

I've used Dells for a number of years and been pretty happy, but this does have me a bit worried. I was really pleased the one time I did have a problem, while living in Austria, with a machine I'd bought in the US: very quick service and no hassles to fix it, so the fact that it's a big, global company turned out to be pretty positive. I'm not sure who else I'd go with...

More than anything, I'm amazed and dismayed that tablets are far surpassing the screens they put on laptops these days: http://www.google.com/nexus/10/ - why won't anyone who's not Apple make a decent screen?! They've gotten worse, as my current machine does 1920x1200, and you can't find those anymore.

The problem is that Windows 7 and prior don't handle high DPI screens too well - the UI elements come out too small.

Windows 8 does have better handling for high DPI screens, so hopefully we will see some higher resolution screens coming out over the next year.

Agreed. Modern laptop and desktop monitors are shameful regressions in technology. I very strongly believe that a large portion of any real or perceived market weakness of PC manufacturers can be traced to an utter failure to innovate in displays.

I also blame the "HD" moniker. My rant on HD: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/hd-sucks

>> why won't anyone who's not Apple make a decent screen?!

The perception in the non-Apple segment of the market is that the customers will not bear the increased cost.

That market does exist though. I've known quite a few people who have asked me for advice on laptops who were dismayed when I told them the cheapest they could get a laptop was $250. I've also had the same type of people come to me when their $250 laptop dies after 6 months and they "threw away all that money" on some cheap garbage.

A $250 laptop will last you 6 months while a $1000 laptop will last you five years, but there is still the market who finds a better deal in the incredibly shitty computer.

You're inadvertently helping me make my point. You've framed $1000 as a high(er)-end laptop. The cheapest Retina MacBook Pro is $1,700; $1,000 is the cheapest laptop Apple sells. That the entry-level price point to the Apple system is at the high(er) end of mainstream PC laptops was essentially my whole point.

Higher price points let them include higher specs, even on non-obvious pivots like pixel density and overall build quality.

This laptop is something like 3 years old at this point, and I bought it new for around $1200, I think. And it does 1920x1200. So it's not really that only Apple can afford to put this kind of thing on a laptop - I don't buy that.

We don't know what percentage of sales models like yours were of the manufacturer's sales. Was that percentage increasing or decreasing? Was it profitable? There are a lot of factors at play here. If it wasn't selling, they're going to do less of that and more like the sub-$500 ones that are. Perhaps they concluded that the market for $1200 laptops is not worth pursuing.

Also worth noting is that 1920x1200 is less dense than the Retina displays.

> Also worth noting is that 1920x1200 is less dense than the Retina displays.

So you'd expect it to cost less.

I run Linux, and I am not interested in MacOS X, even if the hardware is nice. It's not a good fit for how I work.

It wasn't inadvertent, it was intentional. I'm agreeing with you that there exists a market that sees $1000 as too much to pay for a laptop, and the $250 market exists. I then went on to disagree with that market based on personal experience. I've also seen some markets who will look at a $1000 Thinkpad and say "if I'm spending that much, I might as well buy a $2000 Macbook".

$1000 is the high end of the Windows laptop line, and gets you just as much as the $2500 Macbook. But you're right, when you hit that price for Windows laptops, people sometimes begin to balk and move to Mac, for one reason or another.

You need margin breathing room for a major component cost increase, which most hardware companies don't have. Plus you want to start small, so you can minimize panel area lost to defects. When you have big margins like Apple has on iOS devices, you can afford a small hit ramping up expensive tech high high DPI displays. Prices come down over time and yields go up, so you can make larger (iPad) and larger (retina MBP) high resolution panels taking advantage of your equipment and experience making small panels.

Other companies are catching up (have caught up?), but relatively poor scaling in Windows 7 made it more difficult. Windows 8 still has the same scaling issue for desktop apps.

Well, they just released the XPS 13 with a 1920x1080 display: http://www.slashgear.com/dell-xps-13-ultrabook-full-hd-editi...

You can get 100% OSS virtual machines through MS Azure. There's a whole division set aside to pimp the MS cloud to folks that don't do MS software.

(As an aside, my Dell laptop runs Ubuntu and keeps the Windows OSes caged in VMs... :) )

How do you even know that's going to happen? MS has invested in Facebook and that didn't lead to them replacing PHP and Linux with Windows and C#

It's unlikely - if the Ubuntu activities at Dell turn a profit, Microsoft will have to make a convincing case that not being Windows-exclusive is somehow detrimental to longterm strategy, and that's going to be a tough sell. Dell is one of (the only?) major player with an offering to a new (and very influential) market.

Nokia is different - Microsoft wasn't displacing a successful smartphone business, they bailed out a massive clusterfk. Maemo was promising, sure, but in no way profitable. Basically, Nokia wasn't in a place financially to make a long bet on a new player in the smartphone OS market - Microsoft was.

Non-core international divisions are more likely to be spun out than killed for nefarious purposes.

Wouldn't Microsoft need a majority in the board to do so?

Exactly! For $2bn out of $24bn they can talk but not much more.

Talking is worth something if the other $22bn is listening.

It's a loan, not shares, either. Does your mortgage lender get to tell you which career path to take?

I think that's not really what microsoft is after.

But if so, would the other board members care either way about Ubuntu/Linux?

And even if they do they could give in on this to get something else.

> But if so, would the other board members care either way about Ubuntu/Linux?

Of course they would care if it brings profit.

> Dell has probably been the biggest vendor of Ubuntu machines, mostly in India and other poor countries. For $2 billion Microsoft gets to tell them to kill any such Ubuntu or Android product line-ups, and any research involving them

In my experience, the vast majority of such devices are wiped and loaded with pirated Windows.

There is no good software in India and other countries for Linux. If you want to run business accounting software, you have to run Windows. And there the prices are so high for Windows and there is no enforcement, so they pirate. They do crackdown on things like Autocad for architects and animation software pretty hard though.

MS has tried to combat this by creating country-specific versions of Windows with activation limited to a specific country with lower prices.

Yes, its actually pretty despicable. For a house that my parents were considering buying, the architect showed them the floor plans, which was done in Autocad. I realized this not only because I'm familiar with the way Autocad prints look, but there were, in large letters printed 'FOR TRIAL USE ONLY'

Until they start enforcing copyright protection, quality software alternatives will never get the boost they need.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com