Yes I meant it as a joke. I do realise that if many people dont buy a particular configuration it would be less profitable because the expenditure involved in keeping a particular configuration alive is amortized over fewer units sold.
That being said - there is a case where its more profitable in the long run for a company like dell to sell an upstart like AMD / ubuntu which is not pulling in the margins yet - the case where the upstart is starting to gain traction.
There are all kinds of problems with this. For one, it could just indicate that Ubuntu has more problems than other OSen and thus needs more searches. The very fact that Ubuntu has a higher number on the trend lines indicates that there are some serious problems with using this method to do the comparison.
This (http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=11) seems a more direct way to compare the shares and seem to indicate Linux is basically flat over the last couple of years. It certainly doesn't indicate any imminent opportunity that Dell might miss here. Even your trend graph shows a substantial decline in Ubuntu searches over the last year.
