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Buy Lindows, Get Fedora and Mandrake Too?
tacarat writes "Lindows has an interesting deal going on right now. If you go to Linuxshootout.com, you can get Linspire/Lindows 4.5, Mandrake 10 and Fedora Core 2 or a mere $29.95 download or $39.95 for the 8 CD set. Yahoo! News covers this story. Quoting Michael Robertson,'Our emphasis on Linspire is ease of use -- making Linux quick and easy to install and use,' he said. 'Other products may have a different focus. That doesn't mean they aren't great products, just that their focus may be different. Every new Linux computer helps the Linux desktop industry, regardless of what company's product you choose'. Also, 'We want to encourage side-by-side comparisons of the latest Linux products.' Interesting strategy. Will their sales go up because people are buying Lindows plus the other two distros, or will it be the other way around?"
This isn't a terrible plan if you a truly confident in your product. I think we've seen that Robertson is confident in Linspire, and although he may be controversial, I think he's done a lot to promote Linux. Promotion is not a bad thing, and from my experience, Linspire is not a bad introductory distro, so this is probably a good thing.
Bill Claybrook vice president at market research firm Harvard Research Group, said he can't see the point to Lindows' three-in-one packaging. "Who is going to pay money to download three Linux distributions?"
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Retail-box is also useless because one order mandrake and fedore CD from chapbytes.com and host of other websites for less $$
Looks like lindows is having hard time selling their *own* product
In fairness, it looks like The "Click-N-Run" is $49 initially for one year. Not sure what the renewal costs, but I think you just buy another one year licence.
Apt-get is free and great for experienced users, but it can be tough for new users to understand. Packages aren't always organized cleanly, and there is lots of old kruft on the Debian tree (How many text editors would a non-techie need?).
I've easily spent more then $49/year of my personal time dealing with problems from Apt-get.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
There is a business model available in somebody creating a pay-for-access server full of OSS software... the feature being that you don't have to fight the rest of the world to get what you want when you want it.
For that matter, ISPs should see value in mirroring major OSS distros on servers within their network... let customers use local bandwidth without having to the real "Internet" backbones, and that saves money for the ISP in the long run.
A long time ago there was a cheap cd set available in shops, that had 5 or 6 distros on it. I think it was called InfoMagik but I'm not sure. Anyway, that was back in the day that not too many people had heard of Linux, and it was still pretty popular. So I guess the strategy might work. Lots of people will probably buy a CD so they won't need to download 2 distros that might take them over a download limit... At least people that might already be considering buying Lindows might jump on it with this offer..
karma capped