Glyn’s modest proposal

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sun 4 Mar 2007 at 10:01 AM

Glyn Moody has A Modest Proposal for Michael Dell. Dell recently launched a site called IdeaStorm that’s based on the idea of user interaction. Like Digg, people can submit ideas to the site, and then people place votes on the ideas they like. A quick perusal of the Dell IdeaStorm site shows some discord in the Dell community. The majority of ideas voted onto the front page relate to pre-installed Linux and/or open source software in general. The top three ideas range in votes from 100,000 to 50,000 and deal strictly with Linux and OpenOffice. Dell’s site hit a nerve — they’ve opened the floodgates for interaction with their users.

Is Dell listening? Apparently not, given their response, which you can read on Moody’s post. Moody’s take on Dell is that the company is stuck doing things they way they do them. In order to open up more to Linux (they already sell Red Hat servers), they would need a culture change. Rather than effect a change on the entire organization, create a separate open source unit within the company. Give it autonomy to develop toward and cater to the open source movement. The classic example of this is IBM when it first created the PC. IBM made an autonomous unit in the company that had a different culture than the rest of Big Blue. It worked and the original PC overtook the world.

It’s clear that customers want easy access to Linux, and don’t want the default Windows installs that come with loads of third-party garbageware. Robust open source tools are out there. Even if you want Windows, how about OpenOffice? How about Firefox as the default browser? How about…? Give your users what they want, Dell. They deserve it.

Tags: dell · glyn moody · ibm · linux · michael dell · open source

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