Launched late last week as a means for the Round Rock, Texas-based hardware vendor to keep tabs on customer feedback, the IdeaStorm site enables users to post suggestions for must-have features and services and promote other suggestions. At the time of writing all of the top three and five of the top ten suggestions involve Linux and/or open source software.
Topping the list by a considerable margin is the suggestion that the company offer Linux pre-installed on its hardware with a multi-boot option alongside Windows. The suggestion had been promoted almost 65,000 times at the time of writing, almost 30,000 times more than the next most popular suggestion, that Dell offer the open source OpenOffice.org application suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
The third most popular suggestion, with just under 30,000 promotions is a Linux laptop, while Firefox pre-installed as the default browser ranks fifth with over 22,000 votes, and more promotion of Linux compatibility ranked tenth with just under 9,000 promotions.
Microsoft’s Windows still gets a look in, although users seem to want to cut the extraneous software. The option of acquiring hardware with Vista and no extra software ranks fourth at the time of writing with 26,000 promotions, while the similar suggestion of pre-installing just Windows and Office has 16,000 promotions, and hardware with no operating system at all has 22,000 promotions.
As we noted earlier this week, it will be interesting to see how much Dell listens to customers when they start suggesting the companies ditch unpopular but revenue-generating activities like software bundling.
In the face of such strong demand for Linux and open source software it will also be interesting to see whether the company will launch more Linux desktop hardware. Even if you take into account the enthusiasm of Linux supporters to get their demands to the top of the IdeaStorm wish list, the volume of responses makes it hard to ignore.
All our desktops can run Linux if you want to, we see this as more of a demand issue than a supply issue, the company’s then-chairman and now returning CEO, Michael Dell, told Computer Business Review in 2005. If the IdeaStorm site is accurate, there does not seem to be a lot wrong with the demand.
