Wal-Mart hatched a bold campaign to make the computer affordable for John Q. Public by selling a discount brand with nothing but good ol'
free Linux installed on it.
But after just four short months the retail giant is
pulling the plug on in-store sales of these rock bottom priced
$200 Everex gOS Linux machines.
This news does
not shock me one bit, as I had the privilege of seeing one such rejection first hand.
When my mother's computer finally died after nearly 5 years under the strain of never seeing an air duster, I got the call to find an
affordable replacement. As a part-time Linux user myself, I figured it'd be
easy to teach my mother to accomplish what she needed to do with the computer under the
Linux OS.
In theory, I would have been able to. But the operating system that comes with the system,
"gOS", is a
cumbersome and
ugly looking
monster that teases you with an "easy-to-use" quick-launch bar for items such as "YouTube" or "GMail" but the system
immediately bites you when you start customizing things such as the display resolution.
In my opinion this operating system was
not well thought through. For example, if you click on the YouTube quick launch icon, it takes you to the YouTube website, but
none of the videos will play since the system
does not come with the Flash Player plug-in for the Firefox browser. And for any of you who have played with Linux, installing the Flash Player plug-in for Firefox varies from Linux distribution to distribution.
It was no cake walk on this "gOS" system, that's for sure. Any average computer user would
not have gone through the trouble.
If you adjusted the screen resolution, this "quick launch" bar did not adjust properly to your new resolution.
What an eye sore.
Problems like this are
inexcusable. Didn't someone sit down and put the operating system through its paces
before selling this model to customers? This had all the makings of a
"rush to market" product and the fact that it took as long as
four months to figure this out makes me
scratch my head.
The Linux OS is
absolutely free but comes with an
intimidating learning curve to life-long
Windows users. When Ubuntu's distribution of Linux hit the Internet, that curve has rapidly started to deteriorate. Since Ubuntu, the hardest part of the learning curve for Windows users is the
installation process, as any
hiccups between
Linux and your
hardware can be
difficult to solve for a
beginning Linux user.
If a company was to craft a computer with
100% Ubuntu compatible hardware and strike a deal for commercial use of their distribution on their computers, then you'd have a real
rock-bottom priced computing solution that people could
sink their teeth into. Include a
DVD instruction video on how to run many common
Windows program via the included Windows Emulator (WINE) and it'd be absolute
dynamite.
Here's where Wal-Mart could see
success in selling these PCs while reaching out to the
community at the
same time. If they were to
donate 15-20 of these new Ubuntu PCs to a local continuing education center in exchange for being able to use the classroom for one or two nights a week over the course of one or two years, Wal-Mart could offer
beginning computer classes to the community and get folks trained on the
basics of the
Ubuntu system. Finding instructors for such a class is
easy and
inexpensive (I used to teach basic computer classes at local continuing education centers myself).
After a
solid crash course in
Ubuntu computing, what are many people going to want to do with all this new found computer
knowledge?
Use it, of course. And for
$200 they can take home a computer of their very own from Wal-Mart.
Class participants will either
love the price or simply
feel obligated to
buy a system from Wal-Mart since they offered the class for free.
If you don't think that model of business works, try asking Baby Tenda how crib sales were after their "safety seminars" they invited parents to.
After seeing
success in one market it becomes a case of
"rinse and repeat" across the country. Before you know it, "Wal-Mart computer seminars" could become a
household concept.
So when your elderly mother is running 4 desktops, checking e-mail, instant messaging and surfing the web
all at once on a $200
value computer she got after a computer seminar from Wal-Mart, you can thank me (
or hate me depending on how much you like prying e-mail and IMs from your mother) and hopefully by then I've got my feet up on a desk somewhere
warm and living off of good Wal-Mart
money.
I can dream, can't I?Labels: business, computers, gos, linux, ubuntu, wal-mart
