A blog entry by Andrew Pollack about his experience in finding a Dell computers without Microsoft Windows Vista reminded me of something that happened to me recently.

My nephew needed a new PC, but didn’t want Vista on it, and so we went to our local MicroCenter. I thought that any business that sold computers with Linspire on them would surely be able to still give me a Windows XP machine. The salesperson comes by and we find just the machine he wanted. I asked if I can get a machine without Vista, but with something else, and he said, “No, just about all our machines are sold with Vista only.” He then proceeded to recite lines from the Vista sales meeting they must have had a few days prior. I first scolded him on one argument he made that it was a slippery slope and that with 5 minutes of work, I could prove his argument wrong. I then responded, “Well, I see that half of your demo machines don’t have Vista, so I want one of those… and at a discount… and if I don’t get that, I’ll go somewhere that will listen to the customer rather than thinking they know more than me when they obviously don’t!” One minute later, and we had his new machine (boxed) with Windows XP Media Center.

So much for “…all our machines are sold with Vista only.”