The more things change…

.. the more they stay the same. Several major vendors got in a fight with Microsoft back in the day over their right to preload Linux on their systems. Microsoft (well, Ballmer) allgeded that PC’s without an OS were exclusively purchased solely to help piracy. They fought back and ended up being sued for abuse of the monopoly. I’m sure everyone is aware of that.

Well, few years later, Dell strikes back by offering an “Open Source PC”:

The Round Rock, Texas-based company’s Dimension E510n PC comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system, which can be installed by customers. The computer is part of Dell’s n-Series of PCs, which first started shipping without an operating system back in September 2002.

The desktop retails for $849 and comes with a Pentium 4 processor; 512MB of advanced DDR computer memory; a 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card; an 80GB serial ATA hard drive and a one-year limited warranty.

This combined with the news of Sun and Google teaming up for an Office suite really raises a lot of questions for Microsofts long-standing cash cows. Remember yesterdays blog post about the Google threat. Well, slowly but surely things are looking worse and worse for Microsoft with major new platforms out at least 12 months. Hurry it up boys.