Scoble thinks Microsoft giving away Vista laptops is a great idea, and I agree. A huge barrier to evaluating anything is the pain of setting it up. Send out a laptop already setup and there’s no excuse not to look at it. Win over a few of the influencers and already it’s worth the cost.

Now I’m reading that Microsoft is asking for the laptops back. That makes absolutely no sense. If you have to give back the hardware then you’re not going to go thru the trouble of actually setting it up and using it in real-life. You can play around with the pre-installed tools and poke around the demos, but you won’t install and configure the 10 apps that are your core tools, because it’s just not worth it. After all the trouble of installing and setting up, you have to give it back. Plus you have to worry about any sensitive information you put on there. In short, pain.

I know about this first hand – we had an opportunity to evaluate a nice server, about $30k of nicely configured hardware. I had a couple of guys on the team excited to get their hands on it. Then I found out we’d have to give it back after 3 months.

Think about the cost tradeoff of setting up and evaluating the hardware. I would be putting in resource and investment in checking out the platform, with zero gain at the end. It immediately becomes a worthless proposition.

On the other hand, if the hardware stays, I can justify my investment of resources against the cost of the server. It’s a fair tradeoff.

The MS laptop scenario is a mini version of the same thing. If you’re an influencer your time is valuable, and if you have to give the laptop back then you’re just wasting your time.