a cynical but true article on emachines from an OS spec:
How Much Are You Willing to Pay for a Free PC?
By Robert Stinnett (Robert@UltimateOS.com)
Hands up if you would like a free computer. How about a free car? Can I interest anyone in a free 4-bedroom house in the countryside? All you have to do to claim your free item is to sign this handy agreement, and it?s all yours, absolutely free*!
If you believe advertising these days, money is pass‚. You can quit your job and just wait for the deliveryman to pull up to your door with boxes and boxes of free items. But what is the real cost behind these so-called ?free? PC?s, OS?s and other items currently being handed out in the online marketplace?
The biggest recent explosion in the computing arena is the ?free? PC. You can get a woefully underpowered PC with a whopping 32 megabytes of RAM and 4.0 gigabytes of storage (2 gigabytes of which you cannot alter), and you get to experience all of this on a 15? monitor i . In exchange for all of this, you agree to give up all your privacy online for the next two and a half years. Every click of the mouse we?ll be monitoring. Every purchase from Victoria?s Secret online we?ll ferret away to our advertisers; they can?t wait to find out what type of person you really are.
The same society that can?t sit still for 30 second television ads, calls for the head of Bill Gates when Hotmail has a malfunction, and is in such a hurry to get to the next stop sign we?ve invented a new identifying characteristic of American people ? road rage ? cannot wait to give up 30 ? 40% of the screen area of a 15? monitor to advertisers.
Though many of the ?free? PC companies are quick to point out that they collect only aggregate data, i.e. data that cannot specifically identify an individual, they still target advertising based on past behavior at the PC. Purchase that intimate undergarment for your wife?s birthday and the next time your 12-year old son sits down at the computer he may just find himself staring at an advertisement from that same merchant alerting you to the fact that they are having a sale on a certain item that is sure to make your wife happy, complete with pictures.
Still not convinced? Read the fine print over at Free-PC.com and you will find that before they ship you anything you agree to provide them with a credit card that has at least $600 worth of available credit on it. And for the duration of the 30 months you agree to keep that credit card account in good standing and with at least $600 available credit free. In essence, they are charging you for the computer even if it doesn?t show up on the statement. If they discover, through periodic credit checks, that you fell below that $600 credit limit they can terminate the agreement and take back the computer. If you terminate the agreement, they can also charge you as much as $600. Either which way, you are locked in.
Rush on down to your local Best Buy and for ?free? you can walk out with a 380mhz AMD K6 IBM computer with 64 megabytes of shared memory (8 megabytes goes to the video system) and another huge 4.0-gigabyte hard disc (but you can keep all 4 gigabytes to your greedy self)ii . Sorry, no monitor, but it?s ?free?! All you have to do is sign up for 3 years of Prodigy Internet at 56k @ 19.95 a month. That?s only $718.20 for a computer worth about $350.00 at today?s prices.
Wait a minute, you argue, I?m going to pay $19.95 for Internet access anyway. Why shouldn?t I grab me a ?free? PC and sweeten the deal? First of all, analog modems are dead. The obituary was printed about one year ago. ADSL, DSL and cable modems are in. High-speed Internet access is making its way across America. You are agreeing to get left behind at the starting gate for the next three years putting along in a Model T while the rest of us speed down the highway in a Firebird. Where I live in central Missouri, in a town of 900, we are preparing for ADSL access this fall, it?s everywhere folks.
Don?t even think of canceling that membership in those three years unless you want a stiff penalty leveraged against you. You are locked in. What if you move away from a local phone number to dial into? That?s your problem, not theirs. And even if you plan on being hooked up to an analog connection for the next few years, $19.95 is an outrageous price to be paying for it. Most ISP?s offer service for as little as $9.95 a month now. Or you can always opt for a ?free? ISP in exchange for a little more private information.
Now that you have your ?free? PC you are going to need a ?free? OS to install onto it. Head over to eBay and purchase you a copy of Linux for $9.95 (to cover the cost of burning it onto a 80-cent CD). After it arrives, in about six weeks if you are lucky, it won?t install correctly. Some message pops up about an I/O error at 0x049f in the /dev/hd0 user partition. Huh?
Dial on up Red Hat and you will be informed in less time than it takes for a rumor about Microsoft to spread across the Internet that, ?we do not support free copies of Red Hat Linux distribution?iii . So much for ?free?.
As anyone from Microsoft to IBM to Red Hat can tell you the real money is made in support. Microsoft could throw copies of Windows 98 from the rooftops of buildings; IBM could stick a copy of OS/2 Warp Server in every box of Captain Crunch and not worry for a minute about the bottom line. They aren?t selling you an operating system, they are selling you support. Support is what you are paying for when you purchase software. IBM has known this for years; hence why many of the ?big iron? mainframe applications you don?t buy directly from IBM, you enter into service agreements on a yearly basis.
It?s also why you pay Dell a premium for their computers. Sure, you could get a ?free? one, but when you purchase from Dell you can bet that they will be there to make sure you get everything setup and running. Good luck even finding a support number for the ?free? PC?s.
For those of you who think support isn?t a critical issue, just wait until the hard disc fails to boot up or you get a nice message ?BIOS ROM CHECKSUM ERROR?. In the year since I?ve purchased my Dell I?ve called support twice, never had to wait more than 15 minutes to speak with a representative, and when I needed a replacement part it was on my doorstep the next morning ? all without me paying a cent. Dell has earned a customer for life, and I never felt better about paying what I did for my computer.
In the future, you will see more software and hardware using the model of service agreements. Microsoft has hinted at it already. You will no longer purchase the software directly, instead you will purchase support agreements for a period of time. Anyone who looks for a quality product knows that support after the sale is more important than the purchasing price.
Online merchants are learning this lesson a lot slower than their brick-and-mortar counterparts have. A recent CNet article reported, ?Online shopping is growing dramatically, but so is frustration with e-commerce sites, according to a survey by market research service eBuyersGuide.com.?iv As much as we may hate to admit it, a majority of us have questions about products we buy. If a business doesn?t provide support, no matter how cheap the price for the good, we will end up frustrated and angry at the product and feeling cheated.
In this growing age of privacy concerns, do we really want to give up our personal information for the privilege of using a computer? Do we want to be locked into a particular technology for three years when the Internet and technology are changing on an hourly basis? How good a deal are we getting if the service and support after the sale is no longer there, or never existed?
We all want a good deal, to make our hard-earned money stretch a little farther and to think we got a better bargain on an item than the neighbors. But what price are we willing to pay to get something for free?
footnotes:
i Based on specifications located at free-pc.com
ii Based on information from the September 2, 1999 Midwest advertisement for Best Buy stores
iii Information from ZDNET article ?Red Hat Defends its Trademark? located at zdnet.com.
iv Information from Cnet article ?Web Shoppers Frustrated with Online Service? located at news.com.
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