Dell is shipping Linux machines. Redmond can't be happy. It will be interesting to see how they sell.

Microsoft should be equally worried about Cedega, a commercialized version of WineX. If Dell were smart, they'd ship this preinstalled on the Ubuntu home machines.

I would guess that most of these machines will end up with Windows on them. Some pirate, but more installs with retired authentic licenses.
Since Dell would not stand behind machines without factory OSes, this is a means that allows for fully supported machines to not have the cost overhead of a new Microsloth license.
No computer manufacturer is allowed (without heavy Microsoft attacks legal and otherwise) to openly support recycling OS licenses, but this will be used to get there.

Openoffice could use a lot of improvement. Just importing data to Calc (Excel clone) is horrible. It crashes too.

J#1 is wrong to assume that no-OS and those ubuntified things are the same. The whole point of the excercise is to provide a supportable OS here.

I suspect that the choice of Ubuntu may come back to bite them, but on the other hand, there's a motion within the Ubuntu land to sustain a supportable release (I think it was called "Longer Life-Cycle Distribution" of something like that).

The unfortunate thing is, we'll never know the real data on the support load these systems generate for Dell. They won't publish that.

"Openoffice could use a lot of improvement. Just importing data to Calc (Excel clone) is horrible. It crashes too."

In all fairness, I have to mention that we have been exchanging large spreadsheets daily between Excel and OpenOffice (on Linux) for years, and there has never been a problem.

To each his own.

I suspect that the choice of Ubuntu may come back to bite them

Doubtful, since they're only offering it on three boxes. Its a tiny, but growing market and Dell's just tapping it a bit.