1 post tagged “interfaces”
Over the past 3 weeks, I have bought 3 brand new PCs from Dell. A 17″ laptop for my husband, a 15″ laptop for me, and a Dimension desktop for my mother in law. And Windows Vista came on all 3. I don’t like it, the systems are slower than my other computers, and I really just wanted XP. It did what I needed it to do. I have no interest in flashy pretty interfaces. I just want to get my work done! And now, this….
Friday, April 20, 2007
Dell Reinstates Windows XP As New PC Option
Dell, beaten to a pulp by the stick of public demand, is reinstating Windows XP as an option on new PCs, reversing a January decision to shift entirely to Vista.
You can now grab Home or Professional XP from the bullet points on their configurator, which has for the last three months been a giant ad for their competitors, as far as PC owners unwilling to deal with Vista’s quirks are concerned.
Why would Dell take action that Microsoft would rather it not take? The magic line, “Dell is currently the second-largest PC seller in the world” is why: the top spot was recently nabbed by HP, which, as of today, still foists compulsory Vista on us, at least when buying from their online store.
Remember that Microsoft plans to retire XP in only eight months. The brass balls required to kill off your most popular product to force people to buy its sequel speaks to a breathtaking degree of market control, and that they don’t have any fear whatsoever of OSX or Linux. As a crude but, I hope, effective analogy, could you imagine Sony taking the PS2 off the shelves to “force” people to buy PlayStation3?
The BBC has a great quote in its story, wherein a Gartner analyst wonders why people would prefer XP over Vista. Talk about the ivory tower…
FIGURES.
