Well, not in as many words. But as a follow up to Microsoft’s contracts stipulating that new PC’s to be sold in 2008 will *only* be allowed to ship with Vista, it seems like Dell is intent on making IdeaStorm more than a pretty “Digg Clone”. Ideastorm, for those not following the story, is a relatively recent site which aims to allow Dell’s users to vote up or down, pertinent customer service issues. One popular issue is to have pre-installed Linux.

The issue around not eliminating XP? Almost 13 000 votes.

Well, its one thing having a forum to listen to customer complaints, and its another thing to act on them. Dell, much to its credit, is acting based on their customer’s opinions. In response to the 13 000 votes, Dell is keeping XP as an option on new PC’s in 2008, it would offer the operating on a few models of Inspiron notebooks and two Dimenson desktop PC’s [update: looks like this is for customers in the US only].

Its unclear exactly how this will jive with Microsoft, as my prior understanding was that it was written into their contracts with PC makers that Vista would ship with new PC’s in the next year. Or, whether, as some commenters had mentioned in a prior post, that this was all a smokescreen on behalf of Microsoft in the first place. I think if its the latter, we should see an announcement world wide and in more than one vendor. If we don’t, it may just be the first example of Dell having the stones to stand up to Redmond — on behalf of its customer’s no less.

You might have preconceived notions about Dell’s hardware (as I have), but you’ve got to give them credit to keeping an open mind by not only implementing some crowdsourcing techniques, but actually acting on it in the face that these notions “might” seem counterintuitive. Case in point, a research vice present at Gartner was “baffled” as users usually want the “latest and greatest”. Which is a funny statement, given the way that Vista has been roundly avoided by the online community at large.