Dell and Their Not-listening Ears

While catching up on my feeds in bloglines, I happened across this LinuxJournal posting that was quite intriguing. I appears that Dell has started a site to solicit ideas on what their customers want to see most from the company. Surprisingly enough, the top three requests are for pre-installed open source software. Furthermore, nine of the top 15 requests relate directly to open source software in some way. I realize there is a possibility that all of those votes could be the result of some sort of ballot stuffing, but I tend to think that's not the case. I think there are a lot of people out there genuinely interested in experiencing what the FOSS community has to offer. Here is their response to the top entry:

As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates.

So basically, they gave the politician's answer. To paraphrase: "We're really glad you all signed up to tell us what you want, but unfortunately we don't care that much." In all fairness, though, I understand the sentiment. Supporting a Linux distro would be no easy or inexpensive undertaking. Can you imagine the calls they would be getting from your grandma; or even from relatively PC literate people who unknowingly selected the Ubuntu option because it saved them over a hundred dollars on their purchase? "Um, yeah, uh...I don't see a 'Start' button on this new computer I ordered from you last week."

Oh well, nice try Dell. For my part, I'm perfectly happy downloading Ubuntu and installing it myself if I so choose. But there are many out there who are itching to get away from Windows, but won't do so until the transition is much more streamlined.