Canonical Offers OEMs Recipe for Healthy Linux Netbook Sales
by Kristin Shoemaker - Apr. 09, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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A short piece on Xbit Labs directed me to an interesting post by Chris Kenyon, Canonical's Director of Business Development. In this piece, Kenyon tackles another absolutely critical factor in marketing Linux netbooks (I discussed a few of the others on Tuesday) -- offering quality engineered hardware and carefully configured software that's ready to go, right out of the box.
Kenyon's post offers advice and points to consider to OEMs, consumers, and yes, even Microsoft. It's sound, it's reasoned -- perhaps to the point one wonders why it needed to be said -- and it paints an encouraging picture of the future for Linux netbooks.
Kenyon makes some great observations. Consumers want choice. They want the netbook they purchase to play their multimedia files, they want their browsers to have the Flash Player plugin working right from the start, and they want the operating system on their netbook pre-configured to support its hardware and most commonly available peripheral devices. These aren't unreasonable requests -- so there's simply no excuse to not give the customers what they want.
This means offering alternative operating systems, and this means making sure that the alternatives installed are configured such that new netbook owners can just press the power button and go. Kenyon writes that Linux and XP return rates are similar when certain criteria are met:
- Adobe Flash player being pre-installed
- Basic media codecs being pre-installed (these add a few dollars to the cost of a PC)
- Extensive hibernate and resume cycle testing (many OEMS have had to develop and implement new QA processes to work with Linux)
Of course, for legal (and often philosophical) reasons, many Linux distributions don't ship their systems with proprietary or non-free licensed codecs and software pre-installed. These are very simple, straightforward things to install -- and with rare exceptions, the average netbook buyer wants them. It's not a difficult (or even expensive) modification to give consumers.
This blends nicely with two other points. It seems, then, that the return rates have far less to do with being unable to run Windows programs on Linux netbooks, or that Linux netbooks have an intimidating, unfamiliar interface (at least, not directly -- how many of those returning Linux netbooks are aware that these codecs and plugins can even be installed?). Is it safe to assume that people aren't returning netbooks because they're unable to install Microsoft Office, but because they can't readily watch videos on YouTube? Sure, this is easy enough to put right -- but users completely new to Linux (or perhaps completely new to computers) shouldn't necessarily have to do it. These things should ship installed, with instructions for removal (if desired) and subsequent re-installation (if required).
So it isn't necessarily that these netbooks aren't Windows-based that's the problem. It's that they're not ready to go as soon as they're out of the packaging. People are returning them because they aren't already configured to do all that they're actually capable of doing.
That falls on the OEM, of course -- and a poor delivery means the OEM has to fight an influx of returns, and Linux gets the bad rap. Kenyon isn't harsh with the OEMs, however. He's got a great argument here, as well -- netbooks are a new, fiercely competitive, market sector. There's a learning curve on that front, all by itself. An OEM faces the double-whammy of a new hardware market, and then having to work out how to best configure a new operating system to meet the needs and expectations of its customers. There's a lot of uncertainty, and working out the snags takes some time.
Netbooks are the wild west of hardware. It's tough to proclaim there's law and order, or declare winners and losers, because it's still so hard to differentiate hardware issues, software configuration issues versus software failure, and consumer (and manufacturer) expectations versus reality. But one of Kenyon's points rings true regardless of the landscape: Consumers want choices. I just hope that OEMs continue to work on engineering each of their model options, so that when it comes to time to purchase a netbook, the customer has a decision, not merely "an alternative."
