How Dell and others can fix the "crapware" problem — honorably

One of the things that can be annoying about the blogosphere (and people in general) is harping and complaining without offering reasonable suggestions for solutions to various problems. In my last post about my trials with my neighbors’ Dell machine, I complained but offered no way to reconcile the situation. Jeremy and I had a discussion a little while ago about all of this and during the discussion, I had what I think is a perfectly reasonable idea that I think could solve this problem in an honorable way for everyone involved. First, here are my base assumptions about the business of all this extra software on new PCs:

Computer manufacturers (of which Dell is just one) are subsidizing the sale of cheap computers through distribution deals with the companies whose software and services appear on their desktops. I assume that these computers would be more expensive without these various offers. This suggests that there is a defined per-PC dollar amount that can be attributed to the inclusion of these services. Let’s say for the sake of argument that this amount is $200. It could be any amount — but it’s something.
Consumers are accustomed to the trades inherent in traditional advertising models, i.e. free services in exchange for advertising messages. We view advertising on Yahoo and Google in exchange for search results. We accept commercials on television to a large degree (Tivos notwithstanding). These models are changing constantly in our cluetrain world, but in general, they are alive and well.

OK, with those assumptions in place, here’s my simple proposal: at the point-of-sale (online or in a retail environment), computer manufacturers should offer consumers the option to take advantage of the trialware subsidy or not. To be more specific, Dell should position the trialware as marketing (which is what they are) and give you a price break ($200 in my assumption) if you agree to accept a machine with all the trialware on it, or they can give you the machine clean of the marketing offers if you don’t accept the price break and decide to pay more. My neighbors’ $850 Dell would have been $1050 without all the trialware using those numbers. I bet they would have taken the price break — but at least they would have understood what they were doing and some of the implications. Yes, it’s probably a little counterintuitive at first (“pay more to get less?”), but I think people would figure it out pretty quickly. And yes, it’s not the most appealing solution for dig-in-your-heels idealists who want to rid the world of all marketing programs, but it certainly seems reasonable to me.

What’s wrong with this proposal? Tell me in the comments.

(One note: the reason I put “crapware” in quotes in the title is that not all of the software that comes with a new computer is actually “crap.” Before I arrived, my neighbors — who had no Internet access — had used the Earthlink offer to sign up with them and had successfully connected to the Internet. You can do a lot worse than Earthlink, and when I thought about it, how would an average person bootstrap themselves onto the net without such an offer anyway? So it’s not all bad from a functional standpoint — it’s just the delivery method that sucks.)

Why is setting up a new PC still so painful?

(Follow-up to this post: “How Dell and others can fix the ‘crapware’ problem — honorably“).

This weekend was one of those weekends where good friends with computer problems came a-callin’ in full force. Despite acting as support for many friends for many years now, I still approach the requests with a high level of sympathy for the requestors because setting up and maintaining a PC is still so hard. (Up front: I won’t go to deep into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. . . let’s just accept for a moment that people who are not passionate about computers simply don’t understand why it makes a lot of sense to spend more than $850 for a new Dell with a free printer and a bunch of other accesories.)

This past week and over the weekend, I’ve been helping my friends across the street from me set up their new Dell PC and though it booted up out-of-the-box, it has been ridiculously tedious and frustrating to clean all the trialware and marketing crud off the thing. (Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who has bought a PC recently, but I haven’t bought a new PC in years since I’ve either been using a Mac or a work PC). After tangling with the PC for a few hours, it felt less like a useful tool and more like a child screaming for unneeded candy in the grocery store, except this time the PC was screaming for various online services, anti-virus software suites, printer supplies (hey, the printer is NEW, why do I need toner?!), and online banking services. Click here to sign-up for AOL! Click here to sign up for Earthlink! When I setup their printer, I got the same marketing message in three different contexts at the same time: an icon was placed on the desktop that said “click here for Dell printer supplies,” the small LCD screen on the printer itself displayed the URL for Dell printer supplies (which I won’t dignify with a link here, nofollow or otherwise), and the first test page printed had the same URL for printer supplies. At that point, I expected a Dell representative to kick their front door down and scream the URL in my ear for good measure.

When my kind friends initially called me with questions about all the junk they were seeing, my immediate plan was to go over there and wipe their system clean and only install what they needed. That’s what I’ve always done in the past and it’s a really easy thing to do when a computer is brand new. When I arrived at their house I discovered that Dell didn’t send along a base Windows XP install CD with the machine, though there was a slip of paper in the box with instructions on how to request a restore CD from Dell. Ugh! Why not include this CD in the first place? It’s licensed software that a customer has already bought! (Of course, Dell is not known for good support, so perhaps my expectations are too high in the first place.)

So, Dell is making it literally impossible to do a clean install of Windows XP, then all the junk on the machine makes it more likely that you will have support problems — problems that you will have immense trouble getting solved due to well-documented crappy support (idea: someone should teach the lonely old Maytag repairman how to fix Dell PCs and then he wouldn’t be so lonely).

Of course, I could have told my Quicken-using neighbors to buy a Mac instead, but then they would have had to downgrade to a half-assed version of Quicken, the app they use the most. Sometimes you just can’t win with computers.

I think this explains why a few years ago I saw a discarded computer sitting on the sidewalk near my house with this message scrawled on it in angry black magic marker:

Fuck computers!

We gotta do something about this state of affairs.

Update: Scott Rosenberg just wrote to note that I mis-linked to “half-assed version of Quicken” (accidentally used the previous link to the Maytag repairman. Oops!) I was indeed intending to link to Scott’s recent post on that subject. Thanks, Scott!

Another update: I said in my initial post that Dell did not distribute the system disk, but I just ran through a Dell config for a low-end Dimension B110, and you can choose a Windows XP system disk for $10 extra. I think they should take the confusion out of it, add $10 to the price, and ship that disk with the machine. It’s not just Dell that plays games with the system disks, as David Berlind notes in his response to my post:

This is apparently the new MO of system makers. For example, an Acer Ferrari that I recently purchased for Vista testing didn’t come with a system disk either. Instead, it has a backup recovery disk which restores the system to the exact same state the system was in when I unboxed it.

How the world works

Last month, my good friend Andrew Leonard launched How the World Works (RSS feed), a blog that (in Salon’s words) “aims to bite off small pieces of the big story, while at the same time engaging with the vast complexity of the Internet’s multi-threaded dialogue on the global economy.” The “how the world works” concept debuted with Andrew’s “The World in an iPod” piece in which Andrew literally cracks open an iPod and follows the pieces and parts throughout the global economy. This isn’t just “cool” reporting about the innards of the iPod — globalization is inarguably the story of our times. The “How the World Works” blog picks up where that left off with posts about taking back the word “globalization” (favorite quote: “I’m sure I am not the only person who has a kind of sick fascination with melting icecaps”) and the Camu Camu plant as an illustration of the concept of “bio-piracy” (I wasn’t aware of the Camu Camu plant or the idea of “bio-piracy”. . . until now). I am so subscribed.

I owe Andrew a lot, both personally and professionally (he edited the one and only story I ever wrote for Salon, “The American Way of Snacks,” about a gigantic convenience store convention in Orlando I attended — it’s all 100% true, I tell you!) When I was at Salon leading a team that was implementing open source software all over the place, Andrew’s writing served as a philosophical backdrop for the actual in-the-trenches work we were doing. While I was settling into my first few months at Salon, Andrew was busy interviewing the people who were leading the charge for the software my team was rolling out: Larry Wall (Perl), Richard Stallman (all the GNU stuff), Eric Allman (sendmail), and Eric Raymond (well, no particular software, but “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was important philosophically). I’m pretty sure that Andrew’s story about Apache (on a general interest web site in 1997!) first piqued my interest in Salon. And there’s this story about Linux that ran literally as I was packing my bags for Salon and California (I arrived the following week). And there’s a lot more open source stuff where that came from.

I found an old SFGate story (no longer available on SFGate.com, but still at the Internet Archive) that put it this way:

Along with Salon’s managing editor Scott Rosenberg, Leonard is responsible for creating what is possibly the world’s first technoculture think-tank, where engineers work alongside writers to make high technology useful and elegant, complicated but accessible. And Leonard’s advocacy of free, open source software gives this think tank its moral imperative.

That quote is probably a tad too breathless (nothing like slim budgets to nudge you towards the “moral imperative” of Linux), but the spirit is on target. Salon was actually running Windows NT with the absolutely dreadful Netscape 3.5 web server (yuck) when I arrived in the summer of ’98, and the tiny tech team needed all the inspiration we could muster to turn that around (and we did, as talked about on Slashdot, PC World, and Webmonkey). It was pretty easy to keep our spirits high when we could depend on Andrew to give us a break from our own hacking and regale us with the tales of his latest interviews.

I’m looking forward to more great stuff from Andrew — welcome to the blogosphere, my friend!

Bonus link: Andrew’s fine reporting on a condom patent lawsuit is definitely worth a read if you missed it the first time around.