Death of a Rebel

jwunderl writes: "Just a quick word to let you know that Rebel, who took over the NetWinder line from Corel has gone the way of the dodo. Claining a failed partnership with Fuji, the company informed it's creditors it could no longer continue. The full story is available at the Ottawa Citizen's page." Linux appliances don't seem to be the sure-sell that everyone thought they would be.

Comments

Rebel has always sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Years before they paid $5million for the rebel name and the James Dean crap, Rebel were known as "Hardware Canada Computing" (http://www.hcc.ca). HCC had a nice big cushy contract with the Canadian Federal Government to supply unix workstations and such. It was one of those "Open" contracts where if someone in the government wanted something, they could call, HCC would send it to them, the government would get billed some exorbinant rate, and nobody would really care. That meant that overall they could sit on their butts and do nothing, but still rake in the cash.

The problem was for private companies like mine. Call for a quote? Never call you back. Call again for a quote? Send you a quote for the wrong items. Call for service? "Call the manufacturer, it's not our problem". I did manage to drop a few tens of thousands into them over the years because they did have good prices (over say... Sun Canada, which wasn't saying much). They were the quintessential canadian business: buy something from someone else, and sell it for a higher price, and offer nothing added.

Then they did this whole $5million for James Dean and scribbling "LINUX LINUX LINUX" over everything. I could never get a quote out of them again. I will not miss them.

Rebel.com's Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I was one of the original Corel NetWinder owners. I far as I can tell, there was three problems with Rebel.com

1- They paid a fortune for the 'James Dean' image and the Rebel.com domain.
I remember hearing $6 million at the time. I could be wrong (especially since I thought it was way too much money, even in the .com heyday) Flush with Corel money, they went on a 'branding' and 'mindshare' quest. woohoo.

2- The hardware remained essentially the same years after its introduction.
(Since Rebel.com is down, I can't verify though) Why would I pay a premium price for a 266Mhz StrongARM, when I can get a crazy PIII Celeron system for cheaper. At the time it was introduced, the NetWinder was a decent price point (as a dedicated web server), but not now.

3- Out of their league.
Hardware Computer Canada (HCC) was a small reseller before becoming Rebel.com, and trying to compete with the likes of VA Linux, Sun, and whoever else. They also lost sight of the fact that NetWinders appealed to geeks, and they tried to reposition it as an workgroup office server (an underpowered office server, that is)

Anyway, take what I say with a grain of salt, since they haven't been on my radar screen for a while, and since the site is down, I can't verify what I'm stating based upon today's information. And you can't trust AC's. *wink*

Too bad it wasn't a FRENCH Canadian company

[BluedemonX]

The government would have bailed them out with a couple of billion dollar grants *cough BOMBARDIER cough*