I find it amazing that the U.S. Department of Justice can continue to cover its eyes and ears while Microsoft is allowed to exert its monopolistic power over all hardware manufacturers.

About 20 months ago, I was able to purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 from the lenovo.com website without an operating system installed. Today, I went to purchase a new Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, again without having to pay the Windows Tax. Turns out Lenovo has stopped offering this option. What a complete PILE OF SHIT. Somebody in Microsoft’s “Business Development” or “Partners” team must have told Lenovo to stop offering its customers a simple choice of not having to pay the OEM license fees for Windows. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Microsoft is just too big and too pervasive for anybody to have a damn effect on them.

Frankly, it’s anti-choice, anti-competition, anti-innovation behaviour from Microsoft.

And its ridiculous.

Does anyone out there know how to get a decent laptop any more without having to fork over my money to a software giant that continues to bully all competition out of the market? Your suggestions are most welcome.

P.S. Mac is not an option for me. Sorry.

P.P.S The only thing this post has to do with MySQL is the general discussion on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, and the pending investigation into possibly monopoly concerns by the EC…but of course I can’t comment on that directly…grr.

UPDATE:

Seems DELL offers laptops with Ubuntu installed instead of Windows, at least according to search results from their website. Yeah! \o/ Of course, now I have to just figure out how to get to that customization option. When I’ve gone through the customization screens, no option other than Windows is available. 🙁

UPDATE 2:

The DELL representative on their online chat program was quite helpful and offered this link to laptops they offer with no Windows Tax.