We’ve all heard the story before: little company mugged by Microsoft. So I was inclined to be sympathetic to Mandriva’s complaint against Microsoft last week. Until I looked into it.
Mandriva makes the sale
They signed a contract to sell 17,000 notebooks to Nigeria, loaded with Mandriva’s Linux distro.
They deliver the 17,000 notebooks with Linux and, I assume, got paid per the contract.
Sounds good so far.
Then the raptor of Redmond swoops in
Microsoft then persuaded the customer to replace Linux with Windows.
We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.
Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.â€
Let me get this straight
You sold something. You delivered it. You got paid.
After the customer took delivery another vendor persuaded them to replace your software with theirs.
I’m not seeing the problem, unless you took a loss on the sale hoping to make it up in services or something. If that happened, then OK, be mad. But be mad at yourself.
Or is it the loss of follow-on business? I don’t know. You don’t say.
The StorageMojo take
Microsoft, like EMC, plays hardball. But the Mandriva complaint sounds like sour grapes. No harm, no foul.
Comments welcome, as always.
Is it really possible that a marketeer such as you isn’t familiar with the importance of ‘market share’, Robin? It’s not just the immediate money but the on-going customer interaction and perception of customer acceptance that Mandriva was hoping to leverage.
Am I incorrect in recalling that you have disparaged EMC for behavior very similar to Microsoft’s: stepping in at the executive level to change lower-level, more technically-driven (and arguably more rational) decisions? Would you say “No harm, no foul” in such a case just because EMC hadn’t actually taken back something of value already acquired by a competitor but merely prevented the competitor from acquiring it?
How about the potential issue that Microsoft may be abusing its existing monopoly power to attempt to perpetuate/extend it? Do you believe that is not a legitimate criticism for its struggling competitors to raise?
Sheesh.
– bill
here here!
Bill,
Once you sell something title passes to the customer and it is their choice. Should Steve Jobs be unhappy if I buy a Mac and run Vista on it? No. He got his money.
It is exactly the same with Mandriva. The customer bought the product and then changed it. I can see why they don’t like it, but they did get their sale.
EMC is a tough sales competitor. I don’t fault them for that. What ticked me off is when I thought I had a deal with corporate, but the sales offices ignored it. Corporate said they couldn’t help. In effect, I had no deal and didn’t know it until later.
Using relationships with senior management to get deals turned around is SOP in enterprise sales. Rather than whine, develop your own relationships.
Robin
Just repeating the stances that you took originally really isn’t responding to the questions which I posed (and which your standard original-post closing solicits), Robin. Try again – in particular addressing the specific issues associated with Microsoft’s being a convicted monopolist and hence subject to closer-than-normal scrutiny.
There are specific laws against ‘dumping’ that may also apply here (leaving aside the possibility of out-right bribery).
– bill
Bill,
I don’t know how much clearer I can be. Mandriva made a sale, the sale went through, they got their money. Unless there is something else they haven’t made public I don’t see what the problem is.
As for Microsoft being a convicted monopolist, I don’t see any bearing here. Did they use their market power to crush Mandriva? No. Did they sell software at a loss? Mandriva didn’t allege that. Bribery in Nigeria? Shocking, if it happened, and illegal under US law. I’m sure the Bush administration will get to it RSN. But Mandriva didn’t allege that either.
Their complaint seems to be that their software got replaced – after they had been paid for it. That’s what I don’t get. If they’d been replaced before getting paid, then they might have something reasonable to complain about. Unless there is more to the story than they’ve said, they are just whining.
Robin
Mandriva worked hard to put that deal together to get their OS out there. They generally aren’t in the hardware business. They wanted to be able to point at this big sale and say “17,000 Nigerian students run Mandriva!”. Now they’ve got squat. Probably didn’t make much if anything on the laptop hardware itself (although I really hope they didn’t even lose money on the hardware). I can totally understand why they are ticked off.
Robin,
Don’t worry – some of us understand your (perfectly valid) point. They should be happy, I’m sure this has invalided the 3-5 year support contract they sold as part of the deal…
C
this is what happens if you hard-bundle software and hardware. except normally that’s ms style…
They are whining, whining babies, like most linux “resellers”. They whine incessantly, especially when it comes to MS replacing the “stuff” they call an operating system. Don’t get me wrong linux is fine for a mom & pop server, if you don;t care about losing your data. But for a desktop, you must be kidding.
Before anyone comments about Mandriva being ticked off about being replaced by MS, first try using Mandriva as a desktop OS. Not just a starting browsing and loading webpage, but really use it. Maybe there was a reason it was replaced. Now don;t get me wrong, this is not a Mandriva issue, its a linux community issue. The Nigerian govt. should be giving MS an award. Aren’t those students lives hard enough ?
Maybe if the linux community would spend their time analysing why linux is being replaced on the desktop with MS products and correct the issue, instead of whining about it, they wouldn’t have to work so hard on the deal or be worried about being replaced.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/government-law/public-sector/news/index.cfm?newsid=6124
Looks like the OS is going back to Mandrake Linux. The Nigerian goverment doesn’t like the contractors getting bribed by big companies.. Also, the ComputerworldUK article mentions that the contract was going to eventually expand to 100,000 computers, and that mandriva was customizing the OS to their specs, and providing support for $10US per computer.. So the problem appears to not be the 17,000 laptops, but the next 83,000 that it was working on.
The Nigerian government has recognized what a huge waste this is and put a stop to it. Normally I wouldn’t have cared one way or another about this story but…
xfer_rdy: Check out the Asus Eee PC and tell me that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop. I have never used Linux before 4 days ago. But I wanted an ultra-portable PC and liked the combination of features the Eee had. I was a bit skeptical that it didn’t come with Windows but it’s so small and they claim very functional. I just got my Eee a few days ago. Wow. I am seriously impressed. I had no idea such software was available for free! Glad I didn’t have to pay 25% more for the computer just because it came with Windows and Office etc. And apparently it has lots more stuff under the hood that I don’t even know how to begin to use that would cost a lot extra with Windows. I never cared before but just having saved a bunch of money, I’m a believer!
Bob
Brian, thanks for the link. Maybe that was Mandriva’s intent all along – make a lot of people aware of it and see what happened. The whining wheel gets the grease.
Me, I want one of those 2 lb ASUS Linux notebooks to see a) how usable I find Linux and b) to see if I can get OS X to run on it.
Xfer, you have a good point about the marketing problem. Where’s the Open Source Marketing?
Guys, I appreciate that Mandriva worked hard to get the deal and that doing the integration is non-trivial. I also agree that Nigerian students will be better off learning Linux than Windows. However, if Mandriva was betting on the come to make money, that is a risk they chose to take.
Robin
Today, we learned from a Computerworld UK story, there did seem to be some money floating around in the back channels. Apparently, according to Microsoft’s own man on the ground in Nigeria, “Microsoft is still negotiating an agreement that would give TSC US$400,000 for marketing activities around the Classmate PCs when those computers are converted to Windows.”
Here’s what I want to know (he wrote facetiously): in a world where Windows is supposed to be so much better than Linux on every platform, how come Microsoft has to pay people to get them to use it instead of Linux?
Microsoft bribing someone? Shock. Horror. And to think this is the company that so much of our infrastructure depends on.
It is against the law for a US company to bribe foreign entities in pursuit of business. The US Justice Department needs to look into this.