No more crippleware (reduced functionality) OS's (like the feature-reduced Vista versions) on your machines - or make them pay and pass the savings to your customers

230 points posted to Operating Systems, Software by jmxz 04/02/07

Crippleware - a term for deliberately reduced functionality software - is very offensive to your end users and damages the Dell brand. Apple gets a pretty favorable impression from its users by including fully featured software rather than deliberately reducing the functionality of what they include with their hardware.

Many Ideastorm ideas complain of third party software on Dells that is artificially limited with the goal to frustrate the user (at the expense of the Dell brand) into buying an upgrade. But the biggest offender is rarely mentioned.

Microsoft.

* Please insist that your software vendors not put reduced-functionality OS's (Vista Basic, Vista Business - anything less than Windows Ultimate) on any Dell products in hopes that your end users upgrade. This crippleware is an insult to your users and damaging to the Dell brand. It doesn't cost them any more to print a full-activation-key than it does a crippleware-activation-key. And the fact that Vista Basic is even more limited than XP is very insulting to your new customers. Note to them that neither their competitive OS suppliers (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical) nor yours (Apple) try to force feature-reduced-crippleware on your customers.

* Make your software vendors pay you A LOT to put feature reduced versions of Office Products ("Office Small Business", "Office Home", anything less that Office Premium) on Dell computers. Note to vendors who want to do this that their competitors (Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc) don't try to force feature-reduced office suites on your customers.

* Don't let OS vendors ship an OS that does not include an Office Suite (and not a feature reduced one) on Desktop machines. No desktop machine can be considered complete these days without an Office suite. The idea of selling a machine without one is very annoying.

* Don't let your OS vendor ship a Server OS that does not come with a database. Note that many business users use databases; and that many of the OS vendors you're considering (red hat, novell, canonical) include one.

* Make OS vendors pay you *A LOT* to ship a database with artificial limitations like amount of ram or CPUs. Note that many of the OS vendors you're considering (red hat, novell, canonical) include one or more databases. And not weak databases - your Linux vendors will be including the powerful enterprise-class database servers that power Google Adwords and the .org domain and skype.

All of these practices are an insult to your customers.

If your OS vendors are unwilling to abide by these guidelines, make them pay *A LOT* for the damage they're doing to Dell's brand by artificially limiting the functionality of Dell systems and not letting your hardware work to its full potential.