March 11th, 2008
Wal-Mart "snub" no big deal, says ThinkGOS
Reports on the death of the Wal-Mart Linux PC are greatly exaggerated, according to the man selling its operating system.
David Liu, founder of ThinkGOS, whose Linux powers the Everex “Linux PC” which Wal-Mart has dropped from its stores, told ZDNet the move was expected, a function of the price point, and that the box is doing fine online.
”Making mon
ey from a $199 PC is very difficult. The margins are very small. The margin on a $399 PC is three times that – you have to sell three times as many units. It doesn’t add up.”
“GOS PCs in general have done really well. The in-store sales were less than 10% of the total sales of the PC anyway.
“It sounds like a big story but it’s not that big a story. Right off the bat we were telling people what we were doing was creating a concept. We knew we were targeting a tech-savvy crowd. The customers Wal-Mart has in the stores are our ultimate vision. We learned a lot, but we felt it was only a soft launch.
“All the GOS products have done well online. The crowd we focus on, our niche, is the people who are online, who read news about technology. They know exactly what they’re buying. Online return rates are also low, so our products have done pretty well.”
So with the consumer test done, Liu said, his company is definitely not licking its wounds. In fact it’s planning its next move.
“We have a new announcement scheduled for March 21,” he concluded. Stay tuned.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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