On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Michael Brown <michaelbrown2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> im seeing more and more vendors offer systems with ubuntu and other > linux distros. i agree with bert07 that they are finally starting to see > the linux community. Speaking of "vendors" who are "starting to see the linux community", I note that Lenovo is not one of them: http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/05/09/lenovo-on-the-future-of- the-netbook/ --- The other challenge has been, in order to keep the price points down, a lot of people thought that Linux would be the saviour of all of these netbooks. You know, there were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves $50 or $100 or whatever it happens to be, based on Microsoft’s pricing and, again, from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns because people didn’t know what to do with it. Linux, even if you’ve got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows. So, we’ve seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and it’s ready to go. --- I'm going to call 'revisionist history' on Lenovo BTW; People didn't want "to stay with Windows", they wanted to stay with Windows *XP*. Yet at the same time, XP (which is still much more widely used than Vista; e.g. see http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 and http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-weekly-200827-200921) had all but gone extinct on regular machines from the big OEMs. Thus there was a high demand for it with low supply. When XP netbooks entered the market at a price point of less than half what Vista notebooks cost, they sold quite well as you might have expected! You'll note that while there are fewer Linux-based netbooks than XP ones available, you don't see any in stores with Vista O:) Also it turns out that Microsoft only charged the OEMs $15 per XP Home license on netbooks (http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/19/ms.asks.15.for.xp.netbooks/) which explains why they didn't cost significantly more than the Linux ones. And while MSI apparently had 4x (!) higher return rates on their SUSE systems than they did with those preloaded with XP, Dell's netbooks shipping with Ubuntu (a full third!) had about the same return rate as those with XP (http://blog.laptopmag.com/one-third-of-dell-inspiron-mini-9s-sold-run-linux). What this says to me is that MSI didn't do a good job of picking/testing/tweaking/marketing their distro of choice, while Dell did. My prediction is that companies which decide to put Windows 7 Starter (limited to 3 concurrent applications... can we say "crippleware"? ;) on netbooks are going to have unhappy customers and low sales, those who continue to preload XP will continue to do well and those that preload Ubuntu will see increasing sales. -- Microsoft has a majority market share https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
