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No Demand for Linux in the UK?
eldavojohn writes "If you're a Linux user in the UK looking for a Linux box, you're not going to get it from Acer. The computer maker has started releasing Linux installed machines in Singapore but cited 'no demand' as a reason for not releasing the same computer with Linux installed in the UK. From the ZDNet article: 'Before the launch of the Acer Aspire in Singapore, there had been no suggestion that any major manufacturer other than Dell was even considering releasing Ubuntu-based products. However, Acer president Gianfranco Lanci did tell Financial Times Deutschland that "the whole [PC] industry is disappointed with Windows Vista". Lanci claimed that Microsoft's new operating system had not boosted PC sales, due to concerns over its stability and overall maturity.'"
They just don't want Linux on an Acer.
Not a troll, just saying.
u-bend
...there's just no demand for it round here!
Cost of extra training for sales people on the two differnt product lines if only a small portion will buy the Linux Acers then the cost of training could be more then the cost of sales.
Cost of support, you get a person wanting linux but never used it before, get it and everything seems to go wrong and talking to technical support. I am assuming that they don't use global support.
Cost of wearhousing now you need to manage 2 visual idenintal product lines the difference is the data on each system.
Cost of selling systems without Extra Junk installed, all those demo apps the company pays acer to put default on their system.
Trade Policies, sometimes by changing the OS you may need to renegoate your trade policy with other countries.
There are a lot of extra costs and little have to do with Linux but selling a product in an area where there is little demmand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
hardware vendors are squeezed for profit margin. selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin. Perhaps the studies they may or may not have conducted to determine market demand indicated that people who wanted linux also wanted a lower price tag for the hardware. Perhaps this expectation was inflexible, meaning that unit margin on a given PC would go down if they were to sell without MS. Or if they didn't conduct that study, maybe this is one of their fears that keeps them from offering linux product.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I remember there was a story a few months back about a guy who rejected the Windows license agreement on his new computer. He got his money back for the copy of Windows (without even having to return the OEM CD), and then proceeded to install Linux on it. So people who want Linux could just opt for that route... Maybe then Acer will notice "demand" for Linux!
My sig is permanently on strike.
http://efficientpc.co.uk/
Sell Ubuntu PC's. So, there must be some demand.
Just in case anyone in the UK actually wants a linux PC.
(I'm not affiliated, just found this today while looking for a new laptop)
Agreed; one would think they could increase their margin if the laptop came with no software or OS installed, as they would not have to provide support for any software installed, nor pay licensing for software installed. It could be like an OEM version of a laptop. Unless M$ is paying them to preload windows, it should be profitable. They'd just have to solve the problem of selling it only to people who know full well what they're getting into, tech support wise (i.e. none available to them, regardless of what OS they install).
Sure there is no demand, each and every linux user wants to install linux by himself. Installing linux is the first pleasure of using it, if a manufacturer installs it for you, THEY STEAL SOMETHING FROM YOU. Anyway if you purchase a system with a crippled version of linux like lindows, xandros or licoris, the first thing to do is to erase the disk and install a real distribution.
UNFORTUNATELY, linux installastion is too easy today, most of the pleasure produced by difficulties is gone. In the good old days you would spend days and days trying to figure out why X or sound do not work on your laptop. Unfortunately today all pleasure is gone, you are all set up and going in an hour or so, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING, the installer does your job. This is not the kind of linux I like, I want the installation to be hard! Our only salvation is Gentoo!
Acer said: "If you're a Linux user in the UK looking for a Linux box, you're not going to get it from Acer. The computer maker has started releasing Linux installed machines in Singapore but cited 'no demand' as a reason for not releasing the same computer with Linux installed"
Acer meant: "Because we're hogtied by Microsoft due to us whoring ourselves out to them earlier, We are currently not allowed to offer anything but their 'wonderful'(TM) line of products until 2045"
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I bought my wife an Acer laptop about a year ago. A month out of its warranty, and the motherboard failed. A search on Google turned up multitudes of people with the exact same problem (no video, so the system doesn't even complete POST). To say I was very disappointed would be an understatement.
I guess you get what you pay for with them...
I will never buy Acer again.
I'll have to agree with this comment. Why should Linux users even be concerned with getting their machine with a pre-loaded OS, especially when they may switch over to a new distro weeks/months later?
Linux systems are sold at about the same price as windows systems.Why pay for linux when I can get it for free? Buying a windows system I get more functionality BOTH WINDOWS AND LINUX for about the same price!
I run Linux and I'm in the UK. The problem isn't that there is no market (Windows is hated here as much as it is in the US), it's just that there's no marketing for it. If there was an active attempt at marketing Linux as an OS that will allow you to do projects and not have shit crash and such it would "sell" like hotcakes.
A tech show at 5am on a Sunday morning mentioning Linux in passing every few weeks does not make a market but no one else even seems to know of Linux.
I like muppets.
Why would the PC industry think that Vista would boost PC sales? XP is a mature OS. It works. PC's are powerful enough for most people to do most things they need them to do. Why would anybody think that people would have any interest in running out to buy a new PC running Vista? That kinda' seems like a non-starter to me.
People do that with Apple, largely because people have come to fetishize Apple products. PC's are PC's now. They're appliances. There's no reason to run out and buy the latest and greatest, because the latest and greatest don't really offer anything new, and PC's just aren't all that interesting any more.
I don't respond to AC's.
If I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a potential customer that I wasn't reaching I'd be trying damn hard to make room for them in my product line. I had never been a Dell customer prior to the e1505n model. They asked, and like an awful lot of other people I said that I'd buy a Dell if they factory installed Linux. I bought one, and the irony here is that I sold my less than ninety day old Acer laptop to help finance the purchase.
The point isn't that I was just one customer, it's that I was just one more customer. Dell's market share grew by just one customer that day, and probably a lot more than that but I'm speaking about my own story here. Acer (and dang near all American telecommunications companies) need to get what Dell did, that markets are built one customer at a time. I just don't get what they're teaching in business school these days. Damn kids.
load "$",8,1
I can think of no surer way to incite riotous demand for your linux-loaded hypothetical product.
"Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen? According to the people who hang out around here, consumer demand for Linux has been about to explode for the past 12 years. The demand isn't there on the hardware retailer side. There's no Microsoft conspiracy. The people who want Linux are going to install it themselves. A lot of them are going to build the computers themselves, too. The slight savings you're seeing on computers released with Linux isn't worth the lesser selection for a lot of the rest of the people still interested in buying a Linux-based computer.
I'm a Linux user in the UK, but I'm not remotely surprised by this news. By and large, people in the UK are extremely conservative about IT: Firefox take-up here has been far lower than in the US or mainland Europe, for example.
Basically most people don't want to appear remotely "geek-ish", and to show the slightest interest in what software your computer is running, or to change any of the standard default settings (internetexploreroutlookexpressmicrosoftoffice...) , is to break this anti-geek taboo.
This applies in business and the public sector as well as the consumer market. The use of FOSS in the UK is far lower than in most other EU jurisdictions, in all sectors.
LinUKs
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Well,
Maybe there's a bit of irony in the fact that 50% of our mail servers are Acer Altos servers running CentOS 4 or CentOS 5 - OK, fair enough I had to install Linux myself.
It is, however, possible to get some low-end machines with SUSE pre-installed:
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/128595
"Esys Computer System Celeron 2.66GHZ 512MB 80GB 2MB 16X DVD Rom. Linux"
But this seems more of a means to avoid a "M$ tax", although you do get a passable general desktop for £145 including VAT (no monitor).
AT&ROFLMAO
I seriously think that that it is just a question of time before Microsoft's OEM deals end up in the European Commission. Expect something along the lines of disallowing the license to be tied to a specific motherboard, disallowing per-machine pricing, require vendors to offer system's without software pre-installed at a reduced cost .. etc. There is plenty of precedence for this in other EC rulings so it is just a matter of when somebody pulls the trigger and files a complaint. Sure, it will be hard for the OEMs or other organisations to do so, but at the rate that Microsoft is pissing on everything they get within financial proximity to, it will happen sooner or latter.
Or visit this UK website that is happy to take up the Linux niche that ACER would rather ignore.
https://www.xephi.co.uk/laptops/
Just because ACER says there's no demand doesn't make it true.
XePhi Computers sell really cheap Linux CDs! http://www.xephi.co.uk
This story didn't happen in the UK... a little bit south of that, in Spain. We bought a dozen Acer Aspire "something" preloaded with Linux. It was a pretty good deal and I thought that if they came preloaded with any flavour of Linux it should be pretty simple to either change it or upgrade it... right? WRONG!!! They came preloaded with something called Linpus Linux without X or any recognisable management software or even a note with root password (it happened to be '111111' but it was a long guess process).... so... I decided I would just install any other distro... HA! Tried Debian, OpenSuSE, Fedora and many more but the install system would fail in all of them. After long (and when I say long I mean days...) tweaking we managed to install OpenSuSE on one of them unplugging the floppy disk drive. That gave us a clue on changing some startup parameters to be able to load a full install (I recall noirqpoll and some other obscure settings...). Conclusion: Acer didn't intend that no one would ever be able to use those systems with Linux... I mean.... how much did Microsoft pay them to preload those systems with Linpus Linux in such a way????? Regards,
Lets say that 10% of the market wants Linux...
There will be certain minimum fixed costs in staff training for pre- and post- sales support support, localising manuals and packaging, having the committee meeting about exactly how much you're gonna gouge uk buyers this time, etc. which you will need to shift a certain number of boxes to justify.
10% of the market in the UK is far fewer boxen than 10% of the market in the USA (not sure what market Signapore is covering but it could be large) - so a viable proposition in the USA might not be viable in the UK.
Secondly - the Linux market may be more tech savvy and less inclined to buy from a big player such as Dell or Acer. Not every PC supplier forces you to buy Windows.
Thirdly, lots of us would like to dump windows but know that sooner or later we're going to need it (if only inside a VM). By far the cheapest (legal) way to get Windows is to get it bundled with a machine - a "full" version costs 3x as much (and bear in mind that, in the UK, we're already being reamed for Windows at £1 = $1). It doesn't make a lot of sense not to get Windows with a new machine (especially if the supplier's deal with MS means that MS gets paid either way).
It make even be that the UK is more MS-centric than other areas, because Apple priced themselves out of the market - most importantly education - for most of the 80s and 90s (the 'ol $1=£1 trick again). The other alternative platforms (there were some good ones, but that's not important right now) occupied Apple's ecological niche, but eventually failed for one reason or another. Hence, govenment, education and big business are used to assuming a MS monoculture.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"Most of the Linux evangelists aren't going to be happy unless they install it themselves anyway"
That's true , but why should you be forced to buy an operating system if you are not going to use it . It's not a problem with a regular pc , wich i assemble myself , but i don't have that choice when buying a labtop .
Well , Dell is making some progress on it , by selling labtops with preinstalled Ubuntu , but i have no other choice than that.
I guess that means at least some loss for Acer , and some gain for Dell .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Cost of extra training for sales people on the two differnt product lines if only a small portion will buy the Linux Acers then the cost of training could be more then the cost of sales.
Sales people get training? My experience is that they generally know less than what is printed on the box. How much can it cost to print out a few extra script sheets?
Cost of support, you get a person wanting linux but never used it before, get it and everything seems to go wrong and talking to technical support. I am assuming that they don't use global support.
Maybe they should consider providing the same level of support that they provide for Windows.
Cost of wearhousing now you need to manage 2 visual idenintal product lines the difference is the data on each system.
The '80s called. They want their product handling methodologies back. (Don't answer the other phone. It's the 90's looking for their lame form of sarcasm.)
If Acer is warehousing PCs, then they'll be out of business within the year. PC manufacturers don't build a PC until it is ordered. Do you think loading a Linux hard-drive instead of a Windows hard-drive would be any more trouble than installing a 1024M DIMM instead of a 512M DIMM?
Cost of selling systems without Extra Junk installed, all those demo apps the company pays acer to put default on their system.
You can only load so much junk. Acer makes some money off of that, but I doubt it amounts to what they pay for a Windows license. I think $40(US) is a good estimate of what they would be paying for a license. Each preload amounts to a single advertisement. How much can Nero afford to advertise to one customer. $5(US)? Then you'd need 8 preloads just to pay for the Windows license. If one 'advertiser' drops out, you're losing money. Ubuntu would allow you to make your customer happier, while relieving you of the headache of having to maintain multiple 'relationships'. You also get from under Microsoft's thumb, and can be in complete control of the OOBE ("out of box experience). In other words, Acer can market their laptops instead of Microsoft's product.
Trade Policies, sometimes by changing the OS you may need to renegoate your trade policy with other countries.
I can guarantee that Acer doesn't negotiate trade policy directly. The most it may do is try to buy off some politicians.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
This just goes round and round:
Ummm. O.K. Except for the fact I was explaining why a company wouldn't sell a product with little demmand...
But the best excuse you can come up with for selling Vista is that Vista will be "uniform" with itself if everyone used it. That's circular, don't you think?
You then go on to completely ignore the flexibility of free interfaces to talk about progman.exe as if it does anything of importance outside of Win3.1. KDE, for example, has been made to look exactly like the current versions of XP. No doubt, usability studies will show that people used to working with XP will be more productive on KDE than Vista, just as they did back when M$ switched from 98 to XP. Distributions like Xandros provide a smoother transition to modern software than Vista but give you hardware that works, data security and system stability.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So are you suggesting that Microsoft are above placing pressure on an OEM not to bundle any OS other than Windows with their hardware?
Oh, I see. It's not that MS aren't engaged in anti competitive practices, just you think it's terribly, terribly unoriginal of me to keep bringing up like this. I'll bear it in mind for next time :)
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Umm.. but isn't it being offered on this same hardware in Singapore ?
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