It's more profitable to sell Windows
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Sep 10, 2009 8:53 PM EDT |
The fact remains that if you sell a Linux machine you sell a Linux machine. If you sell a Windows machine you get to sell AntiVirus software, other anti-malware/spyware software, maybe Microsoft Office, and support when it all breaks. It's more profitable for these stores to sell Windows. Doing as Ken suggests is a great way to start a confrontation or get thrown out of the store. Effective? I doubt it. |
| tracyanne Sep 10, 2009 8:58 PM EDT |
It's for all of those reasons, and especially the income from support, that I was told I was an idiot for wanting to sell Linux based machines. |
| gus3 Sep 10, 2009 9:33 PM EDT |
Remember those parodies of the Apple vs. PC (Windows, really *gack*) commercials that Novell made a few years ago? With the cute, brainy, and very self-assured spokesmodel as "Linux"? Maybe it's time for a re-vamp, with the Windows guy coming down with H1N1, and the Mac guy behind bars while people look at him and read the little zoo sign about snow leopards. They both *poof* turn into Linux-women, the PC cured and the Mac set free. |
| tracyanne Sep 10, 2009 9:39 PM EDT |
[quot]]They both *poof* turn into Linux-women, the PC cured and the Mac set free.[/quote] Are you trying to get me shot for TOS violations gus. The come back I have for that image will certainly do it. |
| gus3 Sep 10, 2009 10:21 PM EDT |
@tracyanne: Please send it to me privately. You have piqued my curiosity. (And please remind me not to be drinking anything when I read it.) |
| helios Sep 11, 2009 1:01 PM EDT |
Caitlyn only a fool would argue the profitability of Windows. What I am pointing out is that they have to lie now to do it. Doing as Ken suggests is a great way to start a confrontation or get thrown out of the store. Please remember...you may be dealing with a sales person who is only doing what he was told to do...if he's an MS fanboy, then he will give himself up immediately. YOU are the one that has to stay calm. They have families to feed just like we do. It's not their fault that their management are largely MS quislings...or at the very best, completely uninformed. and Who is going to personally visit the Store Manager and tell him that millions of people are now aware of this campaign and sanctions are being prepared if they carry out this deception and FUD? It's clear that I called for level heads to prevail...will they? Mine will, at 10 AM tomorrow...starting at Best Buy. Warning labels are ignored all the time... Did you see the graphics of the sites listed in various blogs? Those are deceptive at best and outright lies to most who know better. I can't speak for you or anyone, but I find it a bit troubling that anyone could take those out of the equation and instead argue technique. I realize you don't much like confrontation. Actually I admire that and you and others lend balance to some things I say whether you know it or not...but in this case...Caitlyn, some yolks are needed to be broken...Sometimes, people have to get eye to eye with others to make a point. h |
| caitlyn Sep 11, 2009 1:27 PM EDT |
Ken: This is where you and I always disagree. Certainly I agree that what Microsoft has put out is a pack of blatant lies. I almost always agree with your goals. It's your methods that trouble me. I fear that your style of advocacy makes us, the Linux and wider FOSS community, look like a bunch of fanatics. Most people want nothing to do with fanatics. I seriously question whether such tactics might do more harm than good. |
| flufferbeer Sep 11, 2009 2:05 PM EDT |
@helios,
Yes, I think you're right on.
caitlyn might go ahead and encourage sales of Windows machines plus AntiVirus software, other anti-malware/spyware software, maybe Microsoft Office.
Slim profits for her colleagues' winblows sales you think? Maybe, I dunno... But at least she can avoid any types of lying or M$-distortion of the facts without the need to be verbally confrontational with most persons; yourself or yours truly excluded ;-) fb |
| caitlyn Sep 11, 2009 3:33 PM EDT |
@flufferbeer: You're an absolute idiot! I don't sell Windows. I sell Linux and I'm pretty darned successful at it. I'm not being confrontational with Ken. You, OTOH, are deliberately being confrontational with me. |
| flufferbeer Sep 11, 2009 4:15 PM EDT |
current tally of this thread: +1 helios
2c |
| montezuma Sep 11, 2009 4:31 PM EDT |
My current tally of this thread: Caitlyn +1 Helios 0=+1+(-1) Flufferbeer -1 It pays to carefullly read posts.............. |
| flufferbeer Sep 11, 2009 4:32 PM EDT |
Oh, and maybe related to helios's planned store re-information handouts, was there some TOS violation in that Can't. Resist. thread on M$'s planned spread of misinformation of Linux??
Couldn't find my and others' comments there.......... whatever. @montezuma, I'm certainly NOT in the know as far as actual TOS article 6 violations, but I think that calling me or anyone else an actual "absolute idiot" should nudge the editors to issue a second or third warning to that person who wrote this. Sure, it could be that I'm way far offbase in this. If so, then my bad. 2c |
| helios Sep 11, 2009 5:09 PM EDT |
Come on guys...Kumbaya moment here...Caitlyn and I do this about every three months just to knock the rust off. Play nice. I personally hold Caitlyn Martin as one of my go-to folks when I need stuff...she's forgot more about Linux than I will ever know. We simply disagree on how to make omelette's Idiot Cait? Come on...you're sounding like me...heat of the moment stuff ya know. ;-) helios TOS violation 1,243 (or so) |
| flufferbeer Sep 11, 2009 5:47 PM EDT |
@helios Been caitlynched myself before, in past heats of the moments. I am wondering just how successful you all are so far ("y'all" in Austin,TX?) in handing out the Linux re-information handouts in various stores ?? Do you generally get some good customer PR with these, or get ignored, get approached by store managers/guards, teamed up against by the pro-M$ salesfolk, ...etcetera?? I'd think that it would be great for us to know what these stores do to oppose your correcting the anti-Linux FUD strewn out!! |
| helios Sep 11, 2009 6:25 PM EDT |
I haven't yet begun to nose around. I was going to go today but I got a call from the radio station that will run the Linux ads and had to go in and meet with the engineers for a bit...shot a huge hole in my day. Starting with an extremely low-key approach at 10 AM tomorrow...When the closest Best Buy opens up. I'm just going in with my camera phone and do some looking around first. I will look for signs of the graphics and posters we've seen online lately. Then I will innocently strike up a conversation with a section manager and go from there. Amicable and smiling....... Then if I see stuff we need to know about, I will approach the store manager and ask him (if the graphics offer comparisons) if I can prove to him that it's incorrect. If he says yes (like that's gonna happen) I will show him. If he says no, I will thank him for his time, note the time and date along with his name and report back. This first visit is just a probe, not a forray. Will leave the attack dogs and Warehouse 13 artifacts at home. for now. h. |
| tracyanne Sep 11, 2009 6:33 PM EDT |
I was chatting with one of my return customers the other day. She bought a cheap, on sale at Woolies (not a computer retailer usually), laptop about 18 months or so ago (12 month warranty). I zapped the Win XP Home that it came with and gave her a nice Linux box, that she's been using ever since and loving, even to the extent of giving her adult children a really good dressing down when they told her that she should be using Windows... because their favourite programs aren't on the machine, and she is able to control how they use it. Anyway the machine died, it looks like a CPU problem, and rather than spend as much money as she paid for it to get it fixed, she asked me to get her a new machine, which I'm setting up now. I have to find a way to recover her stuff off the old machine though. So, we're talking about her recent trip to Brisbane, for cancer treatment, and her stay with one of her daughters, and husband. And she's telling me about a visit from a friend of her daughter's husband, a bloke in IT. She tells this bloke that she uses Linux (she actually doesn't know which one, I started her on Mandriva, and now she's using Ubuntu), and he tells her that she's using the best operating system she could have chosen, and lists a whole bunch of reasons why she made a great choice. So after some conversation her son in law has decided that he wants to get Linux on his computer. The next time he's up here, he wants to ask me if I'll install Linux on his computer. |
| helios Sep 11, 2009 6:57 PM EDT |
At Tracyanne....all floods begin with a drop.....hammer down girlfriend, yur doin' The Penguin's work now. It's gonna be a long battle... But we can eventually win...81 percent of the computers I installed Linux on, out of close to 900 still retain Linux as of July 2009. That 19 percent includes people who have moved or I cannot contact any longer. That speaks volumes as to what others are prepared to do when given an intelligent and logical choice. Stand by for email. h |
| softwarejanitor Sep 11, 2009 7:19 PM EDT |
@tracyanne What I would recommend for transferring data from one laptop to another is a nifty little device that turns any IDE or SATA device into a USB... I bought one at Fry's for under $25 a few months ago when my old laptop died and I bought an Acer One netbook. I just opened up the old laptop and took out the HD, plugged it into the converter (which includes a power supply (wall wart) with adapters for both 3.5" and 2.5" drives and for both IDE and SATA) and then plugged the USB cable into the netbook (with Ubuntu installed). It showed up and I had no trouble getting it mounted and I was able to copy all my files over quickly. The one I bought was made by a company called SABRENT (www.sabrent.com). Even though it doesn't mention Linux on the box at all it seems to be completely Linux compatible. My old laptop had a SATA drive, but I've also used the adapter to read several other miscellaneous IDE drives I had sitting around. Anyway, the adapter had no problem dealing with a HD with no Windows partitions at all on it, only Linux. It is also supposed to support CD/DVD/CDRW/DVDRW drives, but I haven't tried that. |
| tracyanne Sep 11, 2009 8:12 PM EDT |
thanks swj Ken, I'm slowly getting everything I need together. Not having a big budget to work with means i have to go very slow. But I'm slowly etting to where i want to be. |
| caitlyn Sep 12, 2009 6:20 PM EDT |
@tracyanne: Very cool about what you accomplished with your customer. I agree with Ken. You're doing good. @flufferbeer: Caitlynched? Oh yes, I do remember you complaining that I was turning LXer.com into my personal blog because I was finding interesting stories and submitting them. Scott and Sander thought I was doing something good, actually the word one of the used was "awesome", but you thought it was wrong and I should stop. You got your way, too, as I don't have the stomach for endless confrontation with you. I get it. I really do. You don't like me for whatever reason and whenever you can you post an ad hominem attack. I probably shouldn't have responded in kind. OTOH, what I said was actually milder that what I feel or felt like writing. |
| softwarejanitor Sep 12, 2009 7:56 PM EDT |
@tracyanne Another option is for your client to buy a 2.5" USB drive enclosure, that way they could keep using their old HD as an external device for data transfer, backups, etc. Sometimes Fry's has those in their sales ads for as little as $20-25. This option is attractive if the old HD is large enough to be useful as an external device, less so if its marginal in size. Its also less convenient than the converter that I bought if you need to use it for multiple recoveries since the external cases usually only work for one size and interface drive. External cases are much better for use as a portable drive though, because the converter I have has no case, and thus is sort of fragile in that the drive is exposed and potentially vulnerable to electrical shorts or the cables coming loose. |
| softwarejanitor Sep 12, 2009 8:01 PM EDT |
@caitlyn I don't agree with everything you say, but I will defend your right to say what you want. Provided on this forum of course that it is within TOS, which it isn't really my place to judge. |
| softwarejanitor Sep 12, 2009 8:21 PM EDT |
@tracyanne I dunno if it is "kosher" around here or not, but googling it this was the most reasonable I could find the converter I got: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det... |
| tracyanne Sep 12, 2009 10:48 PM EDT |
@swj I just picked up an external usb drive, with 320Gig HDD inside, ripped the case apart (it's one of those pressed together plastic jobs, so I may never get it back together again), replaced the 320 with my customer's hdd and I can now recover all her files. into the bargin I get a 320 Gig HDD, which may well replace my sub 100 gig HDD on my personal laptop. |
| caitlyn Sep 13, 2009 3:21 PM EDT |
@tracyanne: Sounds like a really good solution for anyone who isn't afraid to open a case. External USB drives are also great for backups. |
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