Verily I say unto thee, that George Barca spake thusly:
> The salespeople have to be educated
Spot the oxymoron.
The problem is the retail channel is naturally biased towards commercial
interests, so getting them to give the hard sell for something which is
basically free, is rather difficult.
Now certainly, from the salesman's perspective, the Netbook is just a
product, and he shouldn't care if one component of that product is free,
but to compound the problem these salesmen are also, like consumers,
indoctrinated with misconceptions by marketing, specifically in this
case by Microsoft with FUD about GNU/Linux.
So how does one educate them, and who would provide this education?
The companies who employ these salesmen are just as biased, and are not
exactly diligent when it comes to training, much less training their
staff to advocate something which is free.
The only solution is to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the retail
channel, giving their competitors complete parity, forcing consumers to
make a choice, and thus evaluate those choices (perhaps for the first
time ever, in many cases). Like water, a truly Free Market tends to find
its own level, and the best product will win (as opposed to the product
most heavily "muscled" by the most corrupt company).
And how to do /that/?
Ask Neelie.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
| is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William
| Pitt the Younger
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
06:00:05 up 78 days, 13:42, 5 users, load average: 0.23, 0.07, 0.04
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