ZaReason's New Linux Netbook
Cathy and Earl Malmrose founded ZaReason several years ago. ZaReason is a Linux OEM that has long intrigued me for a number of reasons: they encourage customers to open their boxes and tinker, they specialize in OEM Linux boxes, and they demonstrate that there is still room for independent shops in the rough-and-tumble world of computer retailing. In many ways the independents out-perform the big businesses as they understand Linux and Linux users, and a Linux-only shop doesn't have to contend with the pressures and restrictions that Microsoft puts on its partners.
Netbooks have been a bright spot in a rather dismal retail landscape, despite most of the bigtime vendors not "getting it" and releasing oddly-botched strangely-customized Linux installations on their netbooks. ZaReason just released their new netbook, the Terra A20. The Terra A20 packs a lot of goodies into a small box. Cathy Malmrose kindly answered my questions about netbooks and the Linux retail business, and shares some valuable insights into surviving in a tough business.
Q: The idea that a netbook should be little more than a limited-purpose dumb terminal to connect to Web apps is still floating around. What's your take on this, is there a market for something like this? Or do your customers want an inexpensive, small notebook that does everything an ordinary notebook does, only smaller?
A: From what I can tell, the crowd is splitting -- some want the strongest little powerhouse they can get; some want an elegant cloud notebook. There is a lot of work being done for both the muscle machines and the cloud machines and we are paying attention to both, hoping to supply both. We already have an Ubuntu netbook with quite a bit of muscle. When someone orders a 500 gig drive, you know it's not just a cloud machine. For the cloud, I'm headed off to Paris tomorrow morning to talk with the JoliCloud developers. JoliCloud appears to have the most promise at this point.
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