Dell and Ubuntu: it's all about the bucks

Sam Varghese
Friday, 04 May 2007 07:36

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

 Anyone's who's thinking of Dell as the saviour of Linux, think again. If those machines on which Ubuntu is installed fail to sell in big enough numbers to justify the decision commercially, then Michael Dell will bid goodbye and move on to his next tryst. All the shouting by angst-ridden geeks won't even register on his decibel counter.

There need be no fear about Ubuntu running properly on Dell machines. The Ubuntu team and Dell engineers will take care of that; it's easy when you can customise machines at the source. And in this case, both software and hardware can be tweaked before the boxes are sent to the point of sale. If people can get Windows to install properly, then installing Linux will be a breeze. And you won't end up finding out that you have bad hardware a few months down the road - Linux does enough stress testing during the installation and simply refuses to run if hardware is defective.

Canonical, the owner of Ubuntu, will be definitely contributing plenty of cash to the venture to ensure that it succeeds. Of course, if you ask Mark Shuttleworth about it, he'll come up with some cute statement or the other like he did last time. At times, being sharp means one can end up cutting one's own self - that's something which Shuttleworth will learn about in the long run.

If Dell is to succeed, it will need to create demand for the Linux boxes it plans to sell. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts - simply because in the past, according to Register journo Ashlee Vance, Microsoft has been willing to allow Dell to meet demand, not create it. "Microsoft told OEMs to 'meet demand but not help create demand' where Linux was concerned," Vance writes; he is the only journalist who did not have stars in his eyes when commenting on Dell's decision.

It will take only a couple of quarters in the US business cycle before Dell's future (or lack thereof) with Ubuntu is known. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu-Dell deal is only effective in the US. The chances of success are thus more limited than if Dell were going into other markets.

The hardware makers who will be watching this experiment will be the smaller companies. Lenovo can do what it wants - and does so. It is a Chinese company and sells Red Flag Linux to customers who want it. The days when an American company dictated terms to a Chinese firm have more or less ended and Lenovo knows this only too well.

HP has long had an interest in Debian - its chief Linux technical officer Bdale Garbee was once a leader of the Debian project - and recently announced that it had made $US25 million by offering support for the distribution in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The customers are all either small or medium-sized businesses or governments. HP is now the number one PC vendor.

If Dell and Ubuntu succeed, it will change the entire scenario for computing. I have my doubts that the marriage will last but this time I would love to be proven wrong.