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Column
More on "deep links," journalists and IPOs
Why you don't need lawyers to block links -- and hot reactions to the Chris Nolan story.
By Scott Rosenberg
[08/18/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 45: The bad news -- WHIP gets whipped by pundits
By Thomas Scoville
[08/18/99]

Fast track
Elon Musk is poised to become Silicon Valley's Next Big Thing. What put him in the driver's seat?
By Mark Gimein
[08/17/99]

Can the Dreamcast save Sega?
Sega wants to lift its market share out of the single digits. Will a cool new console, $100 million in ads and fresh leadership do the trick?
By Moira Muldoon
[08/16/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 44: Hot words as Barry barbecues his board
By Thomas Scoville
[08/14/99]

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"I saw an opportunity to empower the people on the planet who don't have the readily accessible income to dedicate thousands of dollars to a system and make a contribution to this emerging information economy," says John Wiess, CIO of Ebiz. "There's a philosophical bent there, some community involvement on my end, that will help make the world a better place -- I hope."

Despite the optimism of the computer manufacturers and their operating-system partners, there are plenty that pooh-pooh the notion that the free PC gives Linux or Be a fighting chance against Windows. The world, like it or not, still equates "computer" with "Windows," despite the inroads made by Linux and the reentry of the Macintosh as a serious desktop contender. It's quite possible that many consumers won't want to risk a different kind of computer with a newfangled desktop.

As Stephen Baker, an analyst for PC Data explains, "They are up against a much bigger, entrenched competitor. People in the industry may think [a different operating system] is better, but a general consumer wants the most popular widely distributed product, and that's going to be Windows for the foreseeable future."

Other "free PC" companies have already considered, and discarded, the notion of using an alternative operating system. Free-PC, perhaps the best known of the free PC companies, is instead offering a Compaq workstation running Windows, supported by ads that constantly stream across the desktop. Steve Chadima, Free-PC's vice president of marketing, believes that "if you have Linux or Be, there are not enough applications that can run on them, and the customer isn't getting what they expect from a PC." He posits, "If all the consumer wants to do is check e-mail and surf the Net, do a little letter writing, then the applications that exist right now in Linux suites are more than adequate. But if people are taking work home from the office," they will run into problems; don't expect to use Excel, PhotoShop, HTML building tools or other complex software on a Net appliance.

And even though computer appliances like the iToaster and PIA are aiming for user-friendly interfaces that spare newbies from dealing directly with the operating systems, the designs aren't foolproof. The PIA, which demo'd at LinuxWorld Expo, offered a clean front interface but problematic guts. Sure, you can open your word processing program with one button, but saving or retrieving your document requires navigating through hidden labyrinthine directories that only a Linux devotee could love. (The creators of the PIA are aware of this, and working hard to make it more amenable to newbies.) The iToaster, in turn, isn't upgradable -- you can only add the software that Microworkz will occasionally make available on its Web site, so if you don't like what's on your computer, you're out of luck.

And those cheap, cheap prices? Many of these boxes don't come with a monitor, so prepare to fork out an additional $150 or so, unless you plan to use your PIA or iToaster as a doorstop.

If the free PC start-ups really plan to take on the Wintel crowd, they have some work to do. Most don't sell their wares through typical retail chains; the iToaster and iDot machines, for example, are only available online. And Microworkz has a reputation for not fulfilling orders in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, Microworkz has shown a lack of industry acumen, allegedly failing to ante up promised payments to its ISP partner EarthLink. The promise of free PCs is such, however, that even as the EarthLink lawsuit was filed, AT&T quickly stepped into Microworkz's favored-ISP position.

Industry boosters are, of course, optimistic. Ebiz's Rassas believes that the Linux-running PIA will be an even hotter product than the company's Windows-based free PC models. Ebiz's top-selling cheap Windows PC has only sold 72,000 units, he says, but the firm's retail partners are estimating sales of 100,000 PIAs each quarter of the upcoming year. His optimism mirrors that of Microworkz's Latman, who believes that "appliance computers" like his iToaster will eventually take over the entire marketplace. As Latman puts it, "We're going to change the whole market; you're going to see it section off. Traditional PC users, which will be a very small group, will go the left, and appliance users will go to the right."

It's still a bit early in the game to be this optimistic -- after all, these are first-generation products in an as yet unproven market. But even naysayers like analyst Stephen Baker admit that if appliances really do take off, there will be a bigger market for operating systems like Linux, Be, Amiga and the MacOS. After all, the interface of an "appliance" doesn't necessarily have to look like a traditional desktop; each interface could be customized for the purpose of the machine, so a user wouldn't care whether it's running on Windows or Linux -- if, that is, the free PC makers succeed in making the back-end operating system invisible. As Baker puts it, "The Internet appliance will be a much less branded kind of business, because the operating system will be embedded in those appliances and you won't know what they are. [Alternative operating systems] have a better chance at those."

If nothing else, it's hard not to hope that the new operating systems will succeed, if merely for the sake of taking a bit of market share away from Windows. "I think the day will come when we start to look at computers as a disposable commodity except in specialized areas," says iDot's Beardmore. "I would love to have a computer be totally agnostic to the operating system; I think the day will come when that happens. I would hate to think what the world would be like with only one operating system."
salon.com | Aug. 19, 1999

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