LAPTOP Magazine interviews Andy Tung, director of U.S. Sales for MSI, who sell between 150-250 thousand of their MSI Wind subcompact notebooks (”netbooks”) a month. Money quote:
We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven’t really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks. … But we are working on some of the issues with the SUSE Linux and even continue to explore other flavors of Linux. We have discussed Ubuntu with a Mac OS type of look and feel. We are talking to different suppliers to figure out the best user experience.
When “the best user experience” means making the best Apple knockoff, there’s going to be… a hard time meeting expectations.
