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Interesting goings-on at Dell lately. After losing all their mojo in past years and getting surpassed by HP as #1 computer company, they’re making all kinds of changes. Just the other day came news that they were abandoning the direct-only model and starting to sell some models at Wal-Mart– for $700 or thereabouts, which makes you really wonder how much they must be selling those machines to Wal-Mart for? $150?

Perhaps even more interesting, Dell finally broke ranks with Microsoft and is now offering models with Linux installed, as they announce on their website. From the perspective of Linux’s positioning in the market, this certainly has to go a long way towards establishing legitimacy amid something broader than the X-treme Geek crowd.

Obviously Microsoft has noticed since their army of lawyers is trumping up all kinds of patent lawsuits which Linux allegedly violates. Patents on the blue screen of death perhaps? Actually, Linux probably wouldn’t ever violate that one.

In any case, you would expect that Linux may start to get exposure to a somewhat more mainstream audience now. And just a few years ago it seemed that Microsoft would control the world for all time.

This keeps coming up, but I just posted the other day about the danger of using a business model where your profit stems from policies like causing your customers to hate you. For example, being a monopoly and selling buggy, crash-prone software.