at least people are offering to help, makes me smile.

This sounds more like consumer ignorance than Dell's issue.

There website clearly states its not Windows. They guy technically told her the right thing and he was doing Dell's objective of trying to save costs by not switching out the machine. Only issue is a Linux based machine obviuosly wasn't right for her knowledge of computers and software.

She should have realized that she needed Verizon's specific linux CD and how to save open office products as MS Office compatible docs.

So two issues here,

1. Customers need to actually read wtf they are doing and take responsibility for those actions.

2. Customer Service reps need to ensure customer actually match the products they are buying, especially in the computer realm. That guy should've realized she was not going to be able to utilize the Linux system.

However, this is overall some bad press for Dell that won't do much as very few people will know about it. They should just have her pay the difference for Windows and send her the install disc that would have been available for the same laptop with Windows.

See, you should stick with the best. Windows all the way. ;)

The government and corporate sector are going to have high concentrations of Windows and IE because of their ubiquity and legacy.

I run a network practicaly teh saem size but comprised mostly of personal use computers and the stats favor Firefox overall (IE gets just 31% these days) and a Linux is pushign near 8%.  I'll grant that our average user is likely more computer literate and savvy than the average computer user or government/corporate PC set up.  I'd say the real average numbers are probably in between ours.

In fact, I'd venture to say that it is the corporate sector that keeps MS as ubiquitous as it is.

If the course materials specifically asked for Microsoft Word (I wonder why just document compatibility wasn't enough, maybe they were specifically using some of the colaborative features of Word) it's her fault. Dell can't be blamed not to teach their customers about the different OS ecosystems. She should have checked wether Word is available for Ubuntu (yes I know to most of us reading this might sound odd, but we're talking uninformed mass-market).

The only way Dell would have some responsability on this would be if she had asked them and they'd told her Word is available for Ubuntu or if it was just file compatibility the issue and the Dell reps didn't point her out towards openoffice.

I have had online courses that call for MS Word but most of them either provided MS Word or couldn't tell the difference in an Open Office document with the .doc extension anyway.

Yeah, but with the new colaborative features ya never know, maybe they used it for group assignments or whatever. Microsoft found a good way to keep people biting the Word bullet, who knows... maybe after file compatibility the cours/government might someday force them to agree on and use a standard for colaborative documents.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp