OEM bundled software – Is it junkware? Is it crapware?

Omar had a nifty comment today:

shahine.com/omar/ – Junkware

Ed calls it Junkware. I call it crapware. Either way it’s evil and does much harm. I doubt we’ll see a solution to this soon.

Hm, what is it that Ed said?

Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise ? Why do new PCs come with so much junkware?

Dwight Silverman links to an excellent post today by Claus Valca, who explains why it takes 4.5 hours to make a new PC usable. Part of the burden is updating drivers, part is installing third-party security software, but at least an hour of it is cleaning up bundled software that comes preinstalled on new consumer PCs, with users having no choice over whether to get this stuff.

I don’t think this includes the time it takes to remove all those stickers – like the ones I talked about in this post earlier.

Coming from the Mac World (and the MacWorld, heh) I must say that I was very shocked by this common practice of PC vendors. You definitely don’t see Apple doing this.

The worst part is that, in my opinion, a lot of times, this “value-added” software tends to cause problems. And this degrades the general experience of Windows – giving Microsoft a black eye. Even worse are some of the drivers out there – bad drivers can lead to general OS instability.

You might wonder, why doesn’t Microsoft do something about this? After all, doesn’t Microsoft care about the end-user? Well… Microsoft does! But, these are the OEMs – the hardware vendors. Microsoft can’t tell them what to do legally.

So, therein lies the even worse part: I don’t see any cure to this problem until Microsoft starts building and selling PC’s. Otherwise, Dell is simply competing with Gateway vs Lenovo vs Joe Schmo PC. PCs, in particular, Desktop PCs are basically commodities – and that’s a tough business to be in! They can only differentiate by reducing prices, providing better support, or adding more. And the cheapest, and sometimes most profitable thing to do is add the crapware/junkware that Omar and Ed are talking about. If they don’t get a revenue stream, at the very least, they have another checkbox feature to differentiate their commodity product.

Until some major change happens, Apple will continue to be in a class of their own, delighting computer users – while PC users battle amongst themselves and customers suffer.