Some of you have been asking me about the Inquirer's recent story that we were dumping support for Ubuntu in the U.K. Let me just get this out of the way—the Inquirer was wrong. Now to be fair, the Inquirer did publish an update story after speaking with Dell—more on that in just a bit. What really happened? For a short time yesterday, the link to the Inspiron 6400n was broken on the Dell UK Ubuntu page. That broken link was fixed early this morning, so UK customers can go here to order an Inspiron 6400n with Ubuntu. Sorry for any churn this has caused.
What's most interesting to me is how this situation combined traditional PR with social media. Here's the chain of events.. soon after the original story broke, phubert brought it to our attention by posting an idea called KEEP OFFERING UBUNTU. Soon after seeing the idea, dell_admin1 contacted our counterparts in EMEA to fix the broken link. Matt Domsch weighed in on the IdeaStorm discussion thread to let folks know the initial Inquirer story was wrong. Once it was clear to phubert that we wen't dumping Ubuntu, he reached out to the Inquirer and edited his original idea, saying that they should print a retraction and that the Dell admins should delete the idea. Our PR colleague followed up with the Inquirer to reiterate that we remain committed to Ubuntu. In the end, the Inquirer posted an updated story—albeit a somewhat cynical one.
Thanks to phubert and the IdeaStorm community for bringing this issue to our attention. If you don't mind, we'll leave your idea thread up for a while.