The SolutionProviderDirect.com site may still be standing, but rigor mortis has set in. As of mid-March, Dell stopped taking orders from resellers for its 510D and 610D white box systems.

Dell rolled out the white box program in August of 2002, and we devoted a RAM cover story to the event and its potential significance in our October issue that year. Resellers we spoke with at that time were claiming 25% to 40% in overall savings going with Dell white boxes. By 2005, many resellers found the program insulting, stating that it was more affordable to buy a low-end Dimension or Optiplex box as an end-user than buy a white box through the Solution Provider Direct program. It was almost as if Dell was trying to push away business before killing the project.

Dell’s stance is the old boilerplate line about doing what customers want. Solution providers prefer Dell-branded boxes, the company maintains. Dell is only giving the channel what it wants. Yeah, right. Dell’s consumer and SMB share continues to climb while the white box channel is practically flat (see our January 2005 What Matters column, “The White Box Relationship”). What smarter thing could you do for long-term channel prosperity than give over your white box business to Dell?

Dell still sells its branded boxes into the channel, and informal feedback indicates that resellers can make approximately 5% margin on these sales. Is 5% worth putting Dell’s sticker and advertising on your client’s desktops? One year later, when the customer needs more machines, what vendor name will spring first to his mind? Somehow, marketing your business as a high-quality hardware resource on some configurations while selling Dell on others rings of insincerity.

Release Candidate 1 arrived in early December. RC2 followed in early February. And according to Microsoft spokesperson Josh Cooley, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will be “generally available” in late April. So the wait is nearly over, meaning now is the time to learn the official facts about the new OS...as well as the unofficial facts.

The good, official news from Microsoft is that we will be largely free from backward compatibility issues thanks to the integrated Windows on Windows 64 (WOW64) emulator.

“x64 Edition has near feature parity with Windows XP Pro,” says Cooley, “so x64 has the ability to run the majority of 32-bit applications available today.”

Unlike other emulators, WOW64 supposedly carries no sacrifice in 32-bit application performance. Web reviews show this to be the case save only in gaming, which is still in the process of benefiting from 64-bit driver optimizations. Some tests show a 15+% gain for 32-bit media encoding apps running under x64 Edition, which should be welcome news to media center and content ripping enthusiasts. However, unofficially, word on the Web is that, as of RC1, there still several 32-bit program incompatibilities, including antivirus applications and Starforce copy protection, which means that games using Starforce also won’t run under the new OS. Old 16-bit Windows apps will not work at all. Naturally, Microsoft will be the first to point out that such exceptions won’t be a big deal to x64 buyers.

“You should note that the intended target audience for this release is not necessarily the general consumer,” says Cooley. “It’s more focused on high-end workstation users, business users engaged in solving complex scientific problems, engineering applications, 3D animations, digital content creation, high-end gaming, and others.”

Unofficially, that’s a nice way of saying that only certain niches have need for x64 support right off the bat. The new x64 Edition—not to be confused with 64-Bit Edition, which is for Itanium—supports double the register size of x86-32 as well as 32GB of physical memory instead of the usual 4GB limit (only 2GB for any single application). Virtual memory under x64 extends up to 16 terabytes. The high-end apps Cooley mentions are the only ones with a prayer in the short term of exceeding 32-bit limitations. That said, it wasn’t too long ago that most PCs shipped with 32MB of RAM. Consider the typical 512MB configs shipping today, extrapolate the dates, and you’ll see that 4GB of memory in mainstream PCs isn’t that far off.

x64 Edition looks, feels, and has features identical to XP Pro SP2, including NX-bit support, the Security Center, and so on. While Microsoft expects many more application partners to have native 64-bit support by launch time, you can download the 360-day customer preview (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/upgrade.mspx) and try these 64-bit suggestions from Josh Cooley today:

CAD - UGS Parasolid – Parasolid is a component geometric modeling software, enabling users to model the industry's most complex parts and assemblies.

Digital Content Creation – NewTek LightWave 3D - LightWave 3D is a professional 3D graphics application which will streamline the production process.

Computer Aided Engineering – ESI Group is a provider of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes.

Games – Atari Shadow Ops, Unreal Tournament 2004, Far Cry

Pro Audio Editing – Cakewalk SONAR 4

CAD (Pro Engineers) – PTC ProE

“Hitachi announces 500GB SATA II drive” reads one headline in the AnandTech forums, a proclamation backed up by Hitachi’s own release of the drive stating that it boasts a “complete set of SATA II features.” One eWeek article is titled “SATA II Features Make a Mark at IDF”. Addonics currently sells a SATA II PCI-X RAID controller, and LSI’s MegaRAID SATA 300-8X is billed as an “eight-port SATA II RAID storage adapter.”

There’s only one problem with all of these items: There’s no such thing as SATA II.

“There is no set of specs for ‘SATA II,’” says Joe Cousins, vice president of marketing for Bell Microproducts, which sells high volumes of every hard drive brand save Samsung. “There’s nothing that says, ‘If you have all these things in your drive, it’s SATA II.’ Different companies are adding new SATA features at different rates. Like Seagate added hot swappability and NCQ to their drives in the last few months when others did not. But that wasn’t considered SATA II, just an extension of the current SATA. So when a customer calls and asks if you have a SATA II drive, it really doesn’t specify anything.”

Originally, there was an official SATA II committee, but it was disbanded and reformed as the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO). The old committee defined several features, and these went on to become the presumed feature list for a SATA 2.0 spec that never materialized. Still, the SATA II name stuck. The top four features for “SATA II” are native command queuing (NCQ), hot swappable plugging, staggered spin-up (spinning up only one drive in a multi-drive configuration), and a 3 Gb/sec (300 MB/sec) transfer rate.

According to Cousins, Seagate maintains that there is no such thing as SATA II, just as there was no PATA I versus PATA II, and even sent out memos discouraging people from using the moniker. Others are obviously less conservative.

“I’ll read you this thing I got from Maxtor,” says Cousins. “It reads, ‘SATA II is the basic serial interface with any of the additional features or extensions that have been defined in the SATA spec.’ Things like 300 MB/sec are part of the SATA spec. So it’s confusing.”

With each passing week, 300 MB/sec is becoming synonymous with SATA II, yet even the SATA-IO notes on its site, “The term SATA II has grown in popularity as the moniker for the SATA 3Gb/s data transfer rate, causing great confusion with customers because, quite simply, it’s a misnomer.” All of the “SATA II” features are merely extensions of today’s SATA spec. This is important because two customers could request SATA II products yet expect—and receive—completely different things.

Especially in business environments where adherence to IT requirements or bid specifications is critical, make sure you get your terms right, and if someone requests SATA II, spell out the features they need, not the moniker du jour.

Just a thought for the future here. According to an August 2004 report from Aberdeen Group, a prominent tech market research and analysis firm, SMB companies stated that their top priority for 2005 was reducing operating costs. Second in line, representing two-thirds of those polled, was improving CRM, meaning the ability to acquire and retain customers.

Software to accomplish these two tasks has historically been the domain of enterprise systems, but SMBs are increasingly finding that staying competitive means looking and operating like an enterprise. This is why 23% of SMBs surveyed said they will make "significant investments" in CRM software during 2005. Another 37% said they intended to raise CRM spending "slightly."

The giants of CRM enterprise software are Oracle, Siebel Systems, SAP, and Salesforce.com. SAP, for example, now has a package called Business One targeted at SMB verticals. Oracle tweaked its E-Business Suite and now offers a version for companies with fewer than 500 employees. And there are legions of other developers looking to mimic the Oracle experience in the SMB space without all of the big vendor overhead. We'll circle back to this topic soon in RAM, but be on the lookout for software opportunities to help your smaller clients operate like their larger counterparts.

My first and until last week only brush with Linux was about five years ago when a copy of Corel Linux fell into my hands. I agreed to look at it because it was supposed to be the long-awaited Linux distribution that would feel and act like Windows. Indeed, once I booted up the OS on a test machine, it certainly did look like Windows. But 30 minutes into the experiment, I finally threw up my hands and wiped the drive.

I wasn’t five minutes into using the OS before I had to drop to a command prompt and struggle with figuring out how to “mount” a drive. My sound card turned out to have no supporting Linux driver. And installing a third-party application? Forget it. I could live with the shame of being a computer “expert” who knew nothing about Linux. I’ll take Windows, thank you very much.

Fast forward to last week, when I was dragged against my will into evaluating several supposedly Windows user-friendly Linux distros. I tried Xandros, Mandrake, Knoppix, Linspire, and Debian. Knowing that one of the selling points for Linux is its lower hardware requirements, I prepped a little box running a VIA MII10000 (1 GHz) motherboard and CPU with a 40GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM. Mandrake and Debian refused to install from the CD ISOs I burned, but the others installed without a hitch...and ran beautifully. Xandros 3.0 Deluxe even shipped with a product called CrossOver that allows users to install many prominent Windows-based applications right into Linux. I grabbed my Office XP discs off the shelf, threw them into the machine, and was stunned nearly out of my chair when I was running Word and Excel under Linux 15 minutes later.

Installing third-party applications is still a relatively convoluted affair under Linux, and vendors understand that you can’t ask a would-be Windows convert or computing novice to attempt such a thing. This is why most “distros” come with a custom application installer and [CUT]a[/CUT] hundreds or thousands of popular packages, which is Linux-speak for application components. The OS comes with a handful of apps pre-installed, then the user can pick and choose from the bundled apps available through the installer.

All told, it works swimmingly. Immediately after installation with the OSes that worked on my test PC, I was surfing the Web, sending email, running OpenOffice (the open source adaptation of MS Office), playing games, editing photos, on and on. Literally, these distros deliver everything someone like my wife ever needs. For that matter, they handle everything I need on every PC I run save my primary work system. In fact, I’m seriously considering planting this VIA Linux box next to my primary PC and putting a 2-system KVM switch between them. When I consider the formidable amount of time lost to system reboots, malware cleansing, and the apparently annual ritual of formatting my main PC to restore its ability to run normally, having a second machine that is only two taps of the Control key away to handle all of my Web browsing, IM communications, and email makes a lot of sense. Besides, since it would be idle a lot of the time, such a box would make a great FTP, Web, or email server. Several distros, including Xandros, include such server software in their installer bundles.

You could even view such a Linux and KVM bundle to be an upsell to a companion Windows PC. The Windows machine does the heavy lifting for graphic design or gaming while the $300 or so Linux box does everything tied to the Internet. No more paying $50 to $100 to Symantec or McAfee every year for anti-everything subscriptions. And think of the time saved in not performing system diagnostics and maintenance.

In the end, Linspire emerged as my favorite distro because of its Click-N-Run (CNR) software platform. CNR is Linspire’s online application bundle and one-click installer UI. What makes CNR a must-have is that it does a daily check of the entire system and searches for any OS, driver, or application updates. It’s like Windows Update for the whole configuration. There are nearly 2,000 open source applications available for free with the CNR subscription ($5/month or $50/year) plus a bunch of pay-based commercial apps. CNR is free for the first 15 days after registering, and once an application is on the system, it stays active even if the CNR subscription expires. Aside from CNR being easy enough for even a three-year-old to master, the hands-off maintenance aspect makes CNR a sysadmin’s dream. Linspire may market to consumers, but it’s a terrific TCO prospect for any business productivity system.

The trick, of course, is how to sell a Linux box in a Windows world.

“Linux won’t succeed on the desktop by Linspire beating Windows,” says Linspire president and COO Kevin Carmony. “Linux will succeed on the desktop by some Tier 3 hardware company beating Dell. Look at KooBox.com as an example. They’re a little system builder that advertises they can beat Dell’s pricing. A tiny Tier 3! Because with Linspire you can shave $100 off the system cost just in the operating system.”

“You use price to get people in the door,” Carmony adds. “The reason why Fry’s has the lowest priced PCs in town is because they use Linspire. But when you get people in the door, you say, ‘I want you to know, this is a phenomenal operating system. It’s stable. You’re not going to be rebooting every 10 minutes. You’re not going to have virus and spyware problems. You’re going to save a ton of money on software going forward. But you may want some beefier hardware.’ So you can still upsell to a nicer computer, but the low price on that entry-level system is what will get the attention.”

Carmony notes that Fry’s sells a $199 Linspire PC, and every time a customer comes in to look at it, the sales reps try to upsell the client to a higher-end, Windows-based PC. Despite this, Fry’s still moves 30,000 Linspire systems each month.

System builders can get Linspire licenses for $15 down to under $10 each depending on quantity. One Linspire license covers an entire household as opposed to Microsoft’s one license per PC model. Commissions on CNR subscriptions are only available to the largest resellers, such as Microtel, which supplies Fry’s, although the highest partner program level provides commissions on customer purchases through Linspire’s site.

Obviously, if a large part of your business is comprised of software sales to the consumer and small business markets, Linux may not be the opportunity you want unless you’re willing to master programming under the OS. On the other hand, this is still a Windows world, and if system sales comprise the bulk of your revenue, then Linux may be exactly what you need to capture volume at the low end and upsell into the mid-range.