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Walmart shipping $299 PC's running Lindows
I worked as a consultant for a while for an ill fated company called GlobalPC. The goal of the company was creating a PC that was easier to use than Windows for the 50% of Americans who don't own a PC. The goal was admirable. The technology that they were using (GEOS) was also admirable, but was old, had a tiny developer community and was an incredible pain to debug apps in (object oriented x86 assembly). There were some great dedicated people at the company, but it ran out of money and was sold to some dubious characters from Florida, who were never able to get enough money to get the product to market, but found enough money to keep the company alive for over a year and to drive the stock price up to $30 at one point (See MYTN history). Somebody made money from it. ( I can't complain, I did just fine as a consultant. And I had a lot of fun putting together their internet portal).
The Holy Grail of the company was to get their Global PC for sale for $299 at WalMart, and the sales and marketing guys worked long and hard on trying to get that to happen, without success (you need to guarantee you can make the units before Walmart will commit).
Today I see that Walmart is offering a PC running Lindows for $299 on their site. The price includes AMD Duron 850 Mhz CPU, 128 MB memory, 10 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, Ethernet connection, 56 Kbps modem, and Lindows operating system -- does not include floppy disk drive or monitor. Pretty good deal - a lot better hardware than the GlobalPC was going to be able to provide.
It seems like a real milestone for Linux and for Lindows to have Walmart shipping computers based on them. I wonder who will buy them and for what reason? The GlobalPC people were targeting the lower half of the market, people who were disenfranchised by the prices of computers and how hard they were to use. I am curious if this is who Walmart is targeting. If someone sees any of their marketing material, I'd love to hear about it.
Thanks to Cory for the link. After posting this, saw the Slashdot discussion of the same story. Pretty vapid discussion.
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