DoctorMo's Blog

It looks like the Dell USA website has been updated and is now selling 2 models of Ubuntu laptop. The first is a 10 inch almost netbook which ships with Ubuntu 10.10 (so it’s likely to be a recent addition) and an older Latitude 13-N which comes with Ubuntu 9.10 (which shows it’s likely to be an older model that might not have been properly advertised on the website previously)

What is interesting is that while there are 2 models of Ubuntu laptop, there are 86 models of Windows 7 computer. Clearly showing how far we have to go in order to convince Dell to be more serious about it’s Ubuntu sales and perhaps how far we have to go to cross the chasm.

Your thoughts?

I was at MicroCenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts yesterday. I was helping one of my students find a new laptop that would work well with Ubuntu. Of course this needed my personal assistance because the staff are not trained with anything other than Windows. But that’s an easily remedied problem in my eyes.

The sales staff did kindly let us test Ubuntu Karmic CDs in computers, to see how they worked. I got to see some of the problems in up and coming hardware and what we still have to work on.

One of the big problems was getting machines with Intel HD graphics chipsets to function at all. After grub the screen would go black and stay that way, the CD would be doing things but that’s about all it would do. Other laptops with nVidia and ATI hardware all booted up fine, but had no 3D support.

WiFi was a bugbare for most of the machines with Realtek and Broadcom devices featured heavily. Both requiring extra firmware which is easy to get when your online, but not easy to get when testing on a tied down machine with no Ethernet.

It’s was very hard to test webcam support, I couldn’t find anything in the karmic default install that could grab an image and since most of the wifi chipsets didn’t work, I couldn’t grab a copy of cheese. The sane scanner plugin for webcams still detects a device but fails to grab images (long standing bug). I settled for looking for /dev/video0 which is a good sign that there is something there. Surprisingly every webcam looked like it worked (or was detected at least).

These problems and more are why I strongly advise people to buy machines from vendors that sell pre-installed Ubuntu machines and not buy Windows 7 machines and hope for the best.

The story at Microcenter about why they have such bad consideration towards Ubuntu is mostly an upper management issue. Like a lot of computer sellers they’ve heard the promise of the FOSS ultimate control and ultimate customisation that you get and ran with it. They did try and sell a machine with “Linux” on it, but apparently it was an in-house effort with their cheapest components and their own distro.

Nothing about making your own distro and packing it with the cheapest desktop box is going to sell well. In order to sell Ubuntu (and FDs in general) you need to upsell it on expensive hardware, nice looking laptops and lovely looking cases. It needs to be “wow! what’s that” not “Oh god I have to put up with that”. MicroCenter would be better placed to think of Free Software as materially better software written by professionals and not just an cheap knock-off of substandard coding by volunteers.

As for people wandering around Microcenter: I did a test of leaving the Ubuntu LiveCD booted on a couple of machines and stood from a distance watching people’s attention and what they were looking at. Very rarely did anyone ever become interested in the Ubuntu machine, and why should they when the Windows 7 machines sitting right next to them have all their whiz bang crazy bubble effects, strong contrast backgrounds that shift from one amazing photo to the next and nice looking widgets. In comparison the Ubuntu computer looked like a reasonable but drab office computer, something that the staff were using but that wasn’t very attractive to anyone hunting for a computer.

Perhaps we need a point of sales design, something so outlandish that you wouldn’t want to use it on your desktop, but that would certainly catch the customer’s shallow eye and drag them in to see what it actually was.

Thoughts?

According to the blog of ever increasing entropy, HP have decided to kill off it’s FreeDesktop based Mi netbook on the same day that Microsoft Windows 7 came out.

In a way this is both surprising and not surprising to me.

It’s a surprise because I never figured Hewlett Packard for being this short sighted. Throwing away large sums of development money in order to help short term OEM deals with Microsoft? Well sure, HP might be in pain from OEM contract terms from Microsoft Windows and it might make business sense this quarter. But surely someone in HP must have a sore arse, or are they all cowering behind their “good for business” mantra which must be fairly strong to protect them from doing the right thing for their future business strength and independence.

Now I’m not surprised that the Mi with Ubuntu pre-installed has ended. Yes that’s right folks, it was Ubuntu and it was even developed by Canonical on behalf of HP. They paid a pretty penny to have their own interface and customizations put into the OS.

But look at what they did, they rejected the idea of including the Ubuntu brand with their shipments. The only mention that it was a FreeDesktop at all comes from a note about it being “Linux based” (whatever that means these days).

There is a mutually beneficial arrangement when it comes to brand marketing in the community. Dell sells machines with Ubuntu on them and both Dell and the Ubuntu community benefit from that arrangement. Instead of my LoCo group marketing Ubuntu for just old machines that came with Windows, I could safely point people at Dell and let them buy new computers complete with Ubuntu. Dell benefits because they get customers from the community advocacy and the community gets a big well known OEM to give it credibility and a partner that can ship working systems for cheap.

But HP didn’t want that, they wanted to control the branding of the OS and it’s not a surprise that they didn’t get many people from the Ubuntu community recommending their products. It’s not a surprise that every time someone said “Lets get me an Ubuntu machine” they went to Dell instead of HP.

Which is shame, because HP’s printer division is a much better collaborator. And most of my LoCo peers recommend HP printers simply because we can be almost pretty assured that no matter which one is bought, it’ll work.

So to get back to Microsoft, they’ve shaped the market to make Windows more attractive than it would be on a level playing field, they’ve manipulated OEMs to such a degree that it makes a mockery of anti-competition laws. If you’ve got any doubt of the reasons why bug #1 has to be fixed, it’s because we shouldn’t have to put up with this reduction in fair competition.

If I were dictator of the world, I’d tax any desktops shipped without a FreeDesktop dual boot.