Re: Lenovo ThinkPad survey

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 08:36:08AM -0700, Don Marti wrote:
> We all know the PC business is brutal.  It's like
> running an airline, except that you have to not only
> deliver a minimal-price commodified experience, based
> on inputs you don't control, to someone who hates you,
> but you have to support it for years.
> 
> The way I see it there are two ways out.  One is on
> display every day at the most crowded, best-run store
> at your local high-end mall.  Control the entire
> platform, hardware and software, so you can capture
> all the value of the whole product and afford to make
> a machine that users will want.
> 
> The other way out is to let everybody who has
> the skill and incentive control the platform.
> (See "Coase theorem" on Wikipedia and the RMS printer
> jam notification problem.) Make a commodity business
> work like a commodity business, not one that pretends
> to be integrated and shiny until things break and
> the illusion fails.
> 
> Lenovo is doing a series of surveys on options for
> "retro" ThinkPads.  Today's survey includes an OS
> option question.
> 
> Everyone who has been running Linux on laptops for
> a while has seen this game before.  Every so often
> a vendor chooses to MSFT to get a better deal on
> their OEM licenses.  Good news is that every time a
> hardware company does that, somebody actually gets a
> decent pre-installed Linux box out of it. So have fun.
> 
>   http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-miscellaneous
> 
> And of course every time it happens we can wonder a
> little bit...is this the time that a PC vendor finally
> breaks out of the worst business in the world, and
> stands up in the free market?  Or will Calls Be Made
> and it's back to "business" as usual? 
> 

Thanks for the tip
> Sometimes watching the PC business is like yelling
> at a video of an accident, when you know what's going
> to happen and you yell anyway.
> 
> -- 
> Don Marti <[email protected]>                   
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
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