From: Egan Orion 

Geo. wrote:
> But doesn't your new law have to take effect before OEM's will consider
> preloading? Look at Linux today, how is it that it's now being preloaded, ie
> what motivated that move?

It's a chicken-and-egg situation. One might imagine OEMs decide to offer
preloads when their expected benefits (maintaining or increasing market
share and/or margin) outweigh their costs of the additional option. They
glance nervously at each other and guess whether competitors will do so.
Once one of them makes the leap, they pretty much all have to follow.

In the case of Linux, the additional costs of preloads are relatively low
and users have been requesting it, possibly mentioning white-box assemblers
who have always been willing to preload whatever you want.

Here's a good article on this very subject, and it even mentions how IBM
poisoned their own well by linking OS/2 to the PS/2 and MCA power grab. In
hindsight it's arguable that OS/2 was crippled after IBM pulled that,
though IBM's blindness in pricing OS/2 for business users rather than going
after the mass market early and ferociously also was a big error.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,905155,00.html

BTW, "my" law invokes some unspoken assumptions, like 'ceteris
parabis' (all things being equal) ever popular with economists, along with
zero implication of timeframe: it might take 20 years for Linux to win out,
but that's a short time in terms of economic and cultural development. And
obvious all things aren't equal when your competition plays dirty.

> My point was that it's not a software quality issue, the best software is
> not the "best" software in terms of bugs or crashes or whatever but is
> instead best in terms of a tool, functionality, what does it let me do, kind
> of stuff.

The statement isn't specific about the meaning of "good" or
"bad" and that's intentional.  They mean whatever's relevant in a
specific market.

Egan

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