In a move that’s viewed as a major departure from their direct sales strategy, Dell will start selling their Dimension-line desktops at Walmart stores in June as part of a “global retail strategy to provide customers with more options.”  Keeping with these options, Dell is also giving American buyers the option to have the Linux variant Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed on some of their systems.

I guess Michael Dell wasn’t too happy when he returned to the company earlier this year after a seemingly abysmal fourth-quarter profit.

What I find interesting is this Ubuntu offer.  By having a system configured with this OS, a customer could easily shave a hundred or two off the cost of their PC.  Of course, that said, the OS will only be offered on three Dell products, and only in the US for the time being.  But this could be a pretty big boost for the incredibly user-friendly Linux variant.

I’ve tried a few Ubuntu flavours over the years.  Not for a primary computer, but mainly as a “where are they now?” kind of test.  Aside from understandably limited hardware support, this is an operating system that I would feel comfortable giving my parents.  But this does make me wonder if Dell is going to make a real effort at the retail market again.

Last year, the company had opened two retail stores in New York as a test to see whether they could compete against other mixed-market (direct and retail) providers such as Hewlett-Packard and Acer.  There was even a time when Dell PCs were sold at Best Buy, Costco and Sam’s Club … though that ended in 1994 with Dell citing low profit margins on the business.  So I wonder how different things will be at Walmart, where commercials show that happy face happily knocking a few bucks off the price of products ….

The only positive factor that I can see with this move is that now potential customers can try before they buy.  One of the biggest issues I’ve had with Dell products (aside from their shoddy construction and horrible habit of self-destructing 14 days out of warranty) is that we can’t really see what we’re buying until we get it.  We can’t see if the notebook will fit our hands properly.  We can’t see just how big and obtrusive that XPS case is.  We can’t see that their definition of “Wide Screen XGA” is actually just Wide XGA (give me numbers on your site, Dell.  Your descriptions suck.).

Well … now we can.

June 10th is the day Walmart officially starts selling these things there.  I wonder if any of the M-series notebooks will be available or on display.  I’ve always wondered what the M1210 actually looked like.

Not that I’ll ever own another Dell.