Make big money! Deliver 'The Linux experience!'
Source: Newsforge
Okay, maybe not big money, but Massachusetts-based Open-Pc founder/CEO Morgan Lim says he's turning a steady profit. And lately he's been making waves with plans to move a prominent state government agency entirely to Linux.
The bulk of Open-Pc's revenue curently comes from doing something Dell, HP, Gateway, and IBM apparently aren't squared away enough to handle: Selling desktop and laptop computers with Linux pre-installed -- and not necessarily to dyed-in-the-wool Linux junkies, either.
Morgan says, "A lot of our customers are like teachers and writers, professionals but not in tech fields."
He notes that his best-selling laptop is his most expensive model -- an obvious refutation of the idea that Linux users (aside from this article's author) are only looking for the cheapest possible deal and don't care about anything else.
He says, "The people who come and order from us... usually they call by phone after seeing the Web site, and say, 'Oh, you're selling Linux!' They ask about the laptops, we answer questions. They ask about the differences between Red Hat and Mandrake and SuSE. I give them the usual comparison, and say, 'I can do this for you: install Red Hat 8.0 for you, and also burn a SuSE DVD so you can try that too.'
"Our niche is really customization. They call in and say, 'I want this,' and we do it for them."
