[ Thanks to peter penguin
for this link. ]
“Some victims of the medialess policy ascribed darker motives to
Microsoft. “If I had known in advance that I would be short-changed
this way, I would have ordered my PC sans OS, then purchased
Windows 2000 Pro separately,” wrote a reader who just received a
CD-less PC with Windows 2000 on a drive partition. “As it stands,
there is no way to recover this machine from a disk failure, nor
can I upgrade to a larger disk drive without PartitionMagic or some
other utility to copy the NTFS boot partition. Seems to me this is
an MS ploy to keep folks from experimenting with alternate OSes, as
the penalties for destroying the MBR [master boot record] are
severe.”
“In fact, a number of readers believed Microsoft’s real intent
is to discourage customers from trying alternative operating
systems. “It might be said that this has more to do with
monopolistic anti-Linux behavior than with piracy,” wrote one
reader. “The lack of a CD-ROM will clearly serve as a disincentive
to anyone wishing to experiment with Linux.”
“An IT manager at a large manufacturer says that’s exactly
what Microsoft officials told him. “I spoke to some of my contacts
there, and found out that the medialess format is primarily
designed to be a firewall against competitors like Linux,” he
wrote, explaining it will make it harder to have a back-out
strategy in place if an experimental Linux deployment gets into
trouble. “Now I don’t have any Windows CDs for the backout. What
would you suggest I do if problems with Linux cause me to want to
revert back to Windows? To discourage corporations and consumers
from changing, they are no longer distributing CDs with every
machine, in the hopes that fear of change without any practical
possibility of return will discourage most users from even looking
at other systems.”