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pmontra
> “All PR will let me say is that from an initial investment of $40,000 it has returned, over the four years, tens of millions [of dollars]. That’s as specific as I can get.”

Tens of millions USD sales should map into tens of thousands of laptops. Not ground breaking but still a great ROI.

sokoloff
I would read that as ten of millions [of dollars of profit], not as revenue, which would imply quite a bit more laptops.
WhiteSource1
It probably is revenue. And not a huge investment for Dell. But one that is ROI positive and generates extraordinary goodwill among the dev community. 100,000 laptops across 4 years is not a huge number.
tossacct7777
100,000 laptops across 4 years is not a lot relative to Windows or Apple sales.

But it is a lot for laptops running Linux out of the box.

100,000 in sales is generating 10's of millions in revenue for Dell. Acer or another player now has evidence a Windows laptop can be made to also support Linux out of the box, and it will sell. Whether or not anyone else acts on it remains to be seen.

This could be a good time though. Apple is losing mindshare. Windows Bash is hardly good enough for daily driving.

tinus_hn
It may or may not be worth the trouble of angering one of their bigger partners, Microsoft.

In my opinion this is more about leverage than it is about direct profits though.

todd8
As a personal (and a bit off-topic) antidote, I buy low-end Dell servers without an OS and install Linux, BSD, or OpenBSD. This is easy to do on their web site and they've always run very well for me. Ebay has numerous good deals on used business Dell systems too. They are a dream to maintain, the cases and internals are so nicely organized. Lately, I just bought a Optiplex 3040 from a Microsoft store, it was easy to install Linux (dual-boot in this case).