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Re: WHS - OEM Purchase Only?
Anything that's sold through the system builder channel is easily orderable through anyone with an account at a distributor, so I don't understand why people would be too upset if it wasn't available as a retail product.
Reasons I think it's safer not to make it a retail product...
1) The setup process will format all hard drives during the install. The machine that Mr&Mrs Retail think that WHS is going to protect has now been wiped clean. What do you mean, read the warning messages during installation, I just clicked on next and hit the accept button. The guy in told me this would protect my data!!!
2) The abovementioned machine now has WHS loaded. It is a 5 year old machine, with a 5 year old hard drive. This is the machine they are trusting their data with. Headline prediction - WHS #1 eater of old hard drives and data.
3) An extension of 2) - retail product's encouragement of using existing hardware means that people stick any old hard drive they find around the house in this machine. Excellent, now WHS has a whole bunch of old hard drives in various states of decay. The economics of running a bunch of old hard drives versus a couple of newer, larger capacity drives is something that needs some calculation. Throw in newer, lower powered CPUs, the trend to make people feel guilty if they aren't doing some good for the environment etc etc etc
I'm not saying that people who buy system builder version aren't going to reuse some existing hardware, but considering that it is supposed to be sold with new hardware, you can't really blame WHS when an older drive or machine doesn't cope well. Most would also get a bit of an education of the product en route to their purchase, so it should at least highlight some of the issues that people may encounter
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Well it may be possible that early rumours on "open" retail availability for this product were either a little astray or the WHS team have changed their mind.
