A lot has been said this week about Walmart pulling the Everex gPC and Cloudbook from their stores. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a interesting article on desktoplinux.com regarding his views.
What it boils down to is the people who typically shop at WalMart are probably not even capable of determining what OS their computer is running. All they know is they bought the computer and then bought Quicken and couldn’t get it to run on the gPC.
Linux distros like gOS and Ubuntu aren’t doing enough to educate people by telling them that Linux is another OS, and that they can do all the same things they can do with Windows, Quicken and Microsoft Office, however they won’t be using those programs. They’ll be using Linux, GnuCash and OpenOffice.org and it’s all FREE.
As for gOS, it’s very easy to use and very easy to figure out for new users. So the software design and ease of setup is there, but joe sixpack just wants to run what his friends do and it’s likely not Linux.
What do you think? Have you tried Linux? Tell me what you think. Do you think new users can use Linux? I think they can, but the issue of compatibility will stop them. Linux companies and the rest of the industry needs to push Microsoft to make OOXML the standard file format for Word, Excel, Powerpoint…etc. Until file interchange can be made seamless, everyone will want the defacto standard, which is Microsoft Office. People don’t know that unless your doing something complex, you can write Word files and Excel files on Open Office and send them to each other with no problems. I just got through almost an entire quarter writing papers in Open Office and I didn’t have a single file that was unreadable by my instructor.
So, I implore the readers of Gear Diary to at least try the Ubuntu Live CD for 5 minutes before commenting. It just might surprise you!
This is one reason why I think ultimately most of the apps we use will move to the web. So long as Linux lets you run a web browser (and the apps within it) – you’ll totally remove this type of questioning.
We’re 2 to 3 years away (maybe more) from mainstream users discovering how much it makes sense to use applications via their browser.
Before “browserware” becomes widespread, developers will have to figure out a compensation model because I doubt most users will be open to monthly recurring fees for every app that they use.
More than one person has remarked that eventually all software will be free. I wonder if that is true.
Until 3G is ubiquitous, I don’t thinks apps are going to move to the web anytime soon. Until you can ALWAYS be connected with your information, people will not feel comfortable using only web apps. Case in point, our crash. Google cache saved our buts on this, but if we all used editors on our machines and the editor had a copy of the post, we could just press a button and put it back.
I think the largest thing holding people back from going Linux is the fear of change. They don’t like using a Graphics editor called The Gimp. They are confused by all of the K apps in KDE. In reality, it’s no different than the transition from DOS to Windows except now we’ve lived in the GUI too long and have forgotten what it was like to type in a program name to get it started.
This even comes from people who proclaim themselves to be “open” to change.
If the power user will finally switch in droves, then the low end will follow.
I think you’re being overly harsh to Walmart’s customers. They probably did realize they weren’t Windows PCs and that’s why sales were poor. (Although surely a few took one home before figuring it out.) I’d say the problem was that the average person who’s buying a unix pc was getting it off the web, not at Walmart.
Actually that’s wrong. Sales weren’t poor and in some cases, the machines flew off the shelves. Some geeks probably DID come in to get them and kept them, but there’s probably a huge populous who got “suckered” in by the cheap price and then they got it home, and they couldn’t run their old programs.
Returns is also alot of what drives a retail business. Once that nice gPC gets out of the door and then comes back because it won’t run Tetris Worlds or Lego Star Wars, Walmart loses money. They can’t sell that computer for full price again.
Walmart hasn’t revealed their sales on this machine at least from the B&M stores. However, in other online stores like Zareason, they sold out of the machines.
It’s not a problem with the machines. It’s a problem with who or where Walmart is trying to sell them.
Walmart is a large company, but there’s alot of low income people who come there. It seems like it’s a good place for this kind of machine, but what this experiment has proven is that even lwo income folks want what people like us use. They want Windows because they don’t know enough about Linux. They don’t know Linux can do the job they want to do. They just know that they can’t by software for it and getting it for free won’t matter to them.
People are used to buying 5 inch round plastic disks and shoving them in the slot and installing a program. With gOS and Ubuntu, your likely going to be using Synaptic or some other program to download the new program and install it and that function is alien to alot of people.
I stand corrected. If that’s the case, Walmart could easily have avoided all the returns by just having their sales-people point out “you know that won’t run any of the software we sell here don’t you?”
Come on man…..you’re expecting the common Walmart worker to understand that?? Most can barely spell PC or MP3!
Now, now, don’t be such a snob. I’ll bet there are lots of folks working at Walmart who know how to spell the contraction for “you are”.
And alot that don’t… 😉 Corrected my comment! 😀
A little off the mark.
Retail, and in particular mega-retail like WalMart, has less to do with a small segment of the market like Linux and more to do with sales and profit. What is the market share for Linux, 10% or less? For a company to even take a chance on mass-marketing Linux from a sales standpoint is amazing in itself. WalMart is obviously trying different approaches as it works to expand the types of “specialty” markets (electronics, computer, HDTV, etc.) that it competes in. Not every sub-group can be morphed into a mega-retailer’s style of sales, and Linux is apparently one of those sub-groups. Rather than bashing the big W for dropping Linux, why not praise it for at least trying?
By the way, I don’t work for WalMart, but I do shop there. I keep looking for those drooling, impoverished, illiterate droogies that all the elitists claim are WalMart employees, but I can’t find any… unless they’re actually making fun of the nice handicapped kid that pulls the carts back from the parking lot. Shame.
LOL. That I would have to agree with.