Readers ascribe devious motives to Microsoft’s policy to withhold OS CDs
“An IT manager at a large manufacturer says that’s exactly what Microsoft officials told him. ‘I spoke to some of my contacts there, and found out that the medialess format is primarily designed to be a firewall against competitors like Linux,’ he wrote, explaining it will make it harder to have a back-out strategy in place if an experimental Linux deployment gets into trouble. ‘Now I don’t have any Windows CDs for the backout. What would you suggest I do if problems with Linux cause me to want to revert back to Windows? To discourage corporations and consumers from changing, they are no longer distributing CDs with every machine, in the hopes that fear of change without any practical possibility of return will discourage most users from even looking at other systems.”
Not to mention recovery when Windows has a hard disk crash, like that never happens.