Dumbass consumers squander netbook experience by rejecting Linux

David M Williams
Thursday, 18 December 2008 15:48

Opinion and Analysis

ASUS created the whole netbook market single-handedly with the ASUS Eee Linux PC. The diminutive portable sold in numbers far beyond expectations catching both ASUS and its competitors by surprise. Fast forward to today and Microsoft have gained the upper hand. In this instance the customer isn't right and by rejecting Linux end users are missing the best experience they could have.

I’m not really in the habit of calling people “dumbass” but my colleague Davey Winder used it recently and he’s had a pretty illustrious career. Besides, how else can I express frustration with the foolish purchasing decisions people are making while still remaining relatively family friendly?

Let’s sum up: last year the ASUS Eee was a hot-selling item in the lead up to Christmas. It was cheap – well, not cheap as in dirt, but cheap as in a fraction of the price of a regular laptop. It was tiny, it was light. It had a solid state hard drive and worked with a minimum of fuss and a modicum of power.

It attracted the interest of parents, of students, of hobbyist hardware hackers, of mobile professionals and just plain everyone. I wrote about some of the things people were doing when I asked “Just what can you do with this ASUS Eee Linux PC thing anyway?”

Within months the netbook market had exploded. Hardware vendors were keen to get in on the action with similar low-priced – and low-spec’d – machines coming out left, right and centre. The Intel Atom processor helped further the cause, being a capable modern processor optimised specifically for low-powered mobile devices.

You can find the details here for a whopping 39 models that are available right now – still in time for Christmas!

It made sense that ASUS chose Xandros Linux as the operating system for their first Eee offering. Linux runs well on the low-end hardware that netbooks use. By contrast, modern versions of Microsoft Windows are memory hungry and increasingly crave extra CPU, graphic, RAM and disk grunt.

The sheer reason people bought netbooks in the first instance – and continue to buy netbooks now – is because you get an Internet-capable mobile device at a price tag lower than that of a notebook. It comes down to price. It certainly isn’t because of rich functionality, game playing ability or anything genuinely related to functionality (save for weight and portability issues.)

Here’s where Linux also made perfect sense. It simply costs nothing. There are no licensing fees to pay. A Linux-based netbook incurs no “Windows tax” and the overall price is reduced as a result.

At first, netbooks seemed like they were going to do the incredible: take Linux mainstream. Yet, within a few months the opposite news was coming thick and fast. The public were rejecting Linux. It was Windows they wanted.

But to their own disadvantage. The hoi polloi are wrong. Here’s why.

CONTINUED