Study explains how retailers stop Linux from entering the market

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Study-explains-how-retailers-stop-Linux-from-entering-the-market-1564385.html

by sciurus • 14 years ago

51 40 14 years ago

kevinchen2• 14 years ago

I don't think it's the retailers stopping Linux from entering the mainstream. It's the users. A vast majority of people in the market for a new computer will freak out when the see Linux, because they have no idea what it is and it has no Start button.

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

That doesn't explain all the people buying Macs. What it does explain is why cheap Android tablets can't make a dent in the tablet market, while the iPad, among the most expensive options, prints money for Apple every year. It's the disproportionate importance of branding.

dmragone• 14 years ago

Except people know what a Mac is b/c it has boatloads of marketing behind it. Linux lacks that push.

patricklynch• 14 years ago

Not to mention how relatively easy Macs and iThings are to use. This is subjective, but I think Apple's better than anyone at making computers that "non computer people" can figure out.

jlawer• 14 years ago

I actually think its the sales staff. A lot of the linux devices that reach the market are pushed on unknowing users who freak out when it doesn't work as expected.

People who adopt Macs know its going to be different. The guy in the shop is often saying how much the same it is, and the user doesn't realize that it is different until they try and put the printer driver disk in and it doesn't work.

Produce• 14 years ago

Except that a) some people did a study on this and published a white paper, it's really difficult to find but I'm sure you will if you look hard enough (hint: under your nose) and b) I've introduced very non-technical people to Ubuntu and they have had no problems with it.

atirip• 14 years ago

No, retailers do not stop anything. 1) Nothing, absolutely nothing sells in meaningful quantities for reatailer without marketing. 2) For unknown or new products it is not in the retailers best interest to start create market for somebody elses brand/product. There's nothing to gain. 3) The brand/product must market themselves and as nobody owns Linux, nobody will do that, hence it will not sell.

brudgers2• 14 years ago

"nobody owns Linux"

It's not just marketing, it's service and education, too.

Who trains the retailer's staff? What website do customers go to for support (and how does it compare to Microsoft or Apple?

The business model for Linux is based on charging a premium for support rather than rolling it into the retail price. There's a good reason that Redhat stores don't exist. The Linux business is incompatible with consumer channels.

yardie• 14 years ago

What Linux probably needs is to take a page from Apple and set up a brick and mortar store where people can come in, try Linux, buy a PC, and get some advice.

Does anyone remember how Macs were sold before the Apple store? You had the mom and pop stores that had the expertise but not the volume to make an impact. You had the online stores that had the volume but if you weren't looking, specifically, for a Mac you wouldn't know there was an alternative. And then you had the B&M stores like Sears, CompUSA, etc. They had Macs, tucked away between the radar detectors and vacuum cleaners. Even if you knew you wanted a Mac the sales staff would try to pass you on a Windows PC. With "friends" like these who needed enemies.

Jobs knew he needed to switch things up so worked on retail store concept. Put it in a place with a lot of foot traffic (mall, downtown store, etc.) and make it easy. Want to check email, facebook, etc? Everyone knows you do it at the Apple store, Starbucks wifi costs money. Now you've got everyone in your store using your OS. They might not buy it right away but you've planted the bug in their ear.

For retailers it's just business. No one demands a Linux laptop and the few that due aren't a large enough market to keep them in stock and on the sales floor. If desktop Linux wants to have an impact it's going to need a lot more than a website with ISOs.

cookiecaper3• 14 years ago

I agree. Desktop Linux must have a patron that operates much like Apple if anyone intends for it to get penetration. Canonical is the best candidate but it's not in Shuttleworth's playbook as far as I know, which imo is a real shame.

If you want to push an alternate OS, you can't bundle it like a normal PC and sell it alongside Windows machines. You need to do what Apple did, and make it its own thing: a "Mac" instead of a "PC". Someone needs to box up Ubuntu into 3-6 SKUs, slap some cohesive, trendy branding on it, and get it into sales channels as a "penguin" or whatever and NOT a "PC".

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

We need "Ubuntu Store". I think it's the only Linux brand strong enough just now to manage it.

doktrin• 14 years ago

If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

If the conclusions drawn by this paper are true, this is a massive business opportunity. They practically go so far as to imply that close to 10% of the laptop market is up for grabs if only the pesky retail oligopoly would stop sabotaging their own financial interests.

Does anyone believe this to be the case? I'll be frank : if I did, I would be investing in a new venture instead of writing this.

ebiester2• 14 years ago

https://www.system76.com/

cookiecaper3• 14 years ago

I bought my laptop from System76 and my experience with them has been sub-par. I don't know that I'd recommend them over just buying a widespread commodity model; if it's been out long enough for another kernel release to hit, everything usually works fine.

marcusf• 14 years ago

I doubt their reasons but not necessarily their conclusions. Breaking in to the laptop market seems fiendishly hard, at least due to economies of scale. Sure, 10% might be willing to buy a Linux laptop, but at what markup? When do you just say sod it and buy a Windows laptop to re-install. And from what I gather, Windows is so highly subsidized for OEM vendors that the cost is really negligible.

Further, it seems like the 10% savvy enough to want Linux won't be a perfect subset of the people buying laptops from brick and mortar retailers any way. Breaking in to the market would require a lot of other stuff, not necessarily retail (e.g. an efficient supply chain, direct sales to corporate, quality laptop builds, ...).

brudgers2• 14 years ago

At the retail level, it has nothing to do with economies of scale. It's all about margin.

Assuming it takes the same resources to sell a Linux box as it does to sell a Windows box (which is probably a bad assumption), then the lower price of the Linux box means less profit at a given margin.

It's not Microsoft that's preventing reseller's from offering discounts for Linux, it's basic retailing economics. There's probably only ten or twenty dollars difference at retail when it comes to Linux v. windows when all the factors are considered. It's not as if Linux machines are cheaper in logistics or take up less display space.

DavidAbrams• 14 years ago

This report says essentially nothing concrete.

revorad3• 14 years ago

I don't know how big the opportunity is, but from the interest in my Linux laptop store so far [1], it appears a lot of people do want these machines. Dell's entry into the market is a surprising and welcome change too.

It feels a bit weird to be entering into the laptop market just as the world is moving to tablets. Linux on the desktop is perhaps the most tragic case of too little too late.

But, as a hacker I want to try and push the world in a direction I like and not just accept the status quo.

[1] If you're interested in buying a machine, please sign up here - http://giniji.com. We're currently trying to cut a deal with Lenovo, so things are moving a bit slowly, but we should have it sorted soon.

qxcv• 14 years ago

Hmm, just looking at your homepage there I can't say I'm entirely sure what you do. What do I gain by buying a Thinkpad from you instead of buying it from Lenovo and installing my own distro? Do I save money by not having to pay for a Windows license?

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

What I understand from this article is that brand image and recognition is too strong and pervasive, retailers rely on those brand images and their marketing investments/incentives to support their side of the bussiness. So unless a new or current player invest massive amout of ressources to build a "linux" brand, retailers aren't going to support any new/different tech (aka linux).

I may have misread the article though.

wpietri2• 14 years ago

I doubt there's a strong demand for Linux laptops[1], but there's a fair bit of demand for cheap laptops, so a free OS should have an advantage there.

[1] I'm using one now, but even most of my nerdy friends just use Apple laptops.

mironathetin2• 14 years ago

I assume, as soon as people understand, how much they pay for a Windows licence, linux on a laptop would become more popular. I tried to find a notebook a while ago, without windows. Thats really impossible. IBM used to offer Thinkpads with linux for a while, but that seems to be over now.

rfugger• 14 years ago

As I understand it, manufacturers receive fees for packaging bloatware on Windows machines, and so there's little to no savings to be had with preinstalled Linux, at least until there's bloatware to package with Linux...

npsimons• 14 years ago

If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

They did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC - and those things sold out. Repeatedly. In multiple locations. Then all of a sudden, Microsoft backpedaled on Vista and binning XP, stripped down XP a bit (including the price tag), and most importantly, strong armed the vendors. Lo and behold, you can't get a netbook with Linux anymore.

Let's face it: the demand is there. Linux has worked just fine on the desktop for well over a decade. The market failed, and the legal system (in the form of patents and copyrights) isn't helping. This is why monopolies, overreaching copyright and software patents are bad things.

anamax• 14 years ago

> If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

One possibility is that the market is too fragmented.

Yes, many of you want a pre-installed linux laptop. However, there are two variables in that "want", the software (which distribution) and the hardware (the amount of memory, the processors, the screen, the pointing device, battery life, etc).

With retail MS or Apple laptops, hardware is the only variable.

So, you've got a significantly smaller market, consisting mainly of folks who are reasonably happy doing it themselves, and it's more fragmented.

muyuu• 14 years ago

Eventually Ubuntu or some company like that will take on it, I'm guessing. There are low budget efforts but obviously they cannot compete with the big guns. Very, very deep pockets will be necessary, which is why it's way out of startup territory.

lumberjack• 14 years ago

Three years ago I was going through High School and as you can expect, every single piece of software in the labs was Microsoft branded. Now, I'm with a lot of the same people at University and despite what some people insist, nobody has a problem using GNU/Linux. It is the only option in the labs, but still many people got the hang of it within two to three days.

Although mine is just an anecdote it still follows, that both our educational systems and our corporate environments play a big part (I'd even say a much bigger part) in keeping the OS market share as it is.

celticjames• 14 years ago

Retailers and consumers love Linux! It has has 61% market share. (Source: http://tinyurl.com/ce6t8dk).

Maybe people just don't like Gnome. (viz. http://tinyurl.com/834bn2j)

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

Not too long ago, Linux did enter the market. In a fairly big way. When the netbook craze was really ramping up, around about 25% of units sold were running Linux. That wouldn't have been possible if what the study says is true.

But the Linux units saw a depressingly high return rate. MSI was reporting it was four times that of the Windows netbooks.

So retailers and manufacturers dropped Linux like a hot potato. Not because of some perverse supply chain structure, but because consumers had clearly and emphatically indicated that they were dissatisfied with the product.

mironathetin2• 14 years ago

Agreed. I used linux for 8 years on my main development notebook (a Thinkpad). That was a lot of trouble compared to Mac OS now.

Study explains how retailers stop Linux from entering the market

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