It"s no secret that companies will do anything to get ahead of their competitors. It"s a given, especially in the world of business. Never-the-less, it always seems to stir up a bit of fuss when the tactics are revealed to the public, regardless of what form they"re in. A member of the Overclock.net forums (link goes to a mirror, as the original has gone down due to exceeded bandwidth), who is an employee of Best Buy, has uploaded slides from a Microsoft presentation intended for the company, showing what they want workers to say about Linux.
The presentation stated that Linux has very limited camera and iPod/MP3 player support, as well as printer/scanner compatibility, and that the operating system doesn"t have authorized support at all. As you can understand, this has upset a fair few people who use Linux, and even some who don"t. Linux is, of course, a far more "hands on" experience than Windows is, but there are commercial distributions that do indeed have official support (from companies such as Red Hat). To add to that, the presentation says that Linux doesn"t include support for games such as World of Warcraft; this is an arguable statement, as it"s possible to get it running under WINE, but there"s no official support from Blizzard as such.
We"ve included the entire presentation below, for you to have a gander at. At the very least, it"s interesting to get an inside look at what retail employees are being taught.