I really "sold" Ubuntu yesterday

[azebuski]

Yesterday I happened to be in my local WalMart buying a USB cable and met a guy browsing for a netbook. The cashier/salesman kept pushing towards the machines with Windows, telling him "These other machines don't have Windows, they come with something called Linux, which is junk with no real support, and you can't do anything with it."

This made me mad as hell. I ran outside, grabbed my little Asus netbook from my car, and ran back in the store and showed this guy Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I demonstrated Openoffice, Gimp, all the utilities, and I took him outside and picked up a WiFi signal from the Starbucks across the parking lot and played videos on youtube, read the local paper, checked the weather forecast, and looked at a few PDFs.

He went back into the store and bought a EeePC 900 with Ubuntu. I was so proud of myself. :guitar:

[Eisenwinter]

Sounds a bit of an extreme way to do it, and very random, but hey, good for you man.

:)

[bruno9779]

Sounds like counter-information to me.

I don't sell linux to anyone, but I get very worked up when I hear some of those M$ myths on Linux.

And this is a really good example of the biggest problem ubuntu has with the general public. M$ has almost managed to get Linux in the same group as drugs, terrorism and prostitution: the "don't go there or you'll be sorry you did" group.

People do not choose linux because they do not have the chance to do so.

[scorp123]

A few months ago we hired a new sales guy to re-enforce our sales team. According to what we heard the guy is brilliant at convincing customers to buy whatever he wants them to buy. So far the deals he's coming back with are totally living up to the guy's reputation. We're selling servers and services like mad.

BUT: The guy kept bashing Linux. "Linux is not professional" and all the other FUD. Oh well. He's a sales guy. For as long as he's making sure people buy servers from us (on which Linux and Solaris gets installed ...) we didn't bother too much.

A few days ago I got a phone call. It was my boss. I had to join Mr. "Super Sales Guy" for a product presentation. One customer proved to be particularly stubborn and wasn't convinced by all the sweet-talking our sales guy was doing. The customer insisted to see the product live ...

OK ... so I went there and I of course brought my laptop on which the product was installed inside VirtualBox. So I fired up virtual machine #1 on one side of the cube, virtual machine #2 on another side of the cube (well ... actually it's a cylinder, thanks to the "Cube Deformation" plugin) and a web browser on another side of the cube ... and I started working with the product, showing the features and so on.

And of course ... whenever I switched from one desktop to another the cube/cylinder would rotate .. or unfold ... or thanks to the "Scale" plugin I would see all open windows at once. Or I'd hit Win+E and via "Expo" plugin they were able to see all of my 4 virtual desktops at once ....

Our Mr. Sales Guy was very very very silent.

But the customers (Linux and BSD users themselves as it turned out) were convinced enough so they finally signed the deal.

That evening I received another phone call. My boss again. It seemed that our Mr. Sales Guy had a "very urgent problem" and my boss ordered me: "Help him! I know it's overtime, OK you'll be compensated for that, no problem ... but: Help him!"

OK ... so I called.

You want to know what this super duper hyper urgent problem was?

"My cube isn't working ... how do I enable it?"

After all those stupid comments he made against Linux ... our Mr. Super Sales Guy has switched to Linux. On his own. And installed by himself -- a non-technical user (the guy is a sales person!!). Without any involvement of us techies.

Yet another soul that has seen the light :lol:

[earthpigg]

ive never sold linux like that, and im not sure that i would.

what i would do:

hover my way into the conversation.

listen for specific statements by the ignorant sales rep, and ask the sort of 'critical thinking' questions we all learned in primary school.

rep: "you cant do anything with linux!"
me: "do you have any examples of that?"
rep: "task x"
me: "oh, i do that all the time.
rep: "no support!"
me: "actually, unless one actually preffers waiting on hold for an hour with a phone in their ear, the support is better. you see, we have this thing called THE INTERNET..."
etc



my netbook is a bit of a ****. it hangs out in my car, and it gets around. all my friends have user accounts on it, and it gets frisbeed across the room quite a bit (onto couches, beds, etc... no moving parts = the win).

if questions arise (many of my friends are very non-technical and could care less), i focus on technical advantages at first, and dont bring the Four Fundamental Software Freedoms up unless the conversation is still going after 10 minutes or so and i get a question that leads into it well.

[renkinjutsu]

Yesterday I happened to be in my local WalMart buying a USB cable and met a guy browsing for a netbook. The cashier/salesman kept pushing towards the machines with Windows, telling him "These other machines don't have Windows, they come with something called Linux, which is junk with no real support, and you can't do anything with it."

This made me mad as hell. I ran outside, grabbed my little Asus netbook from my car, and ran back in the store and showed this guy Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I demonstrated Openoffice, Gimp, all the utilities, and I took him outside and picked up a WiFi signal from the Starbucks across the parking lot and played videos on youtube, read the local paper, checked the weather forecast, and looked at a few PDFs.

He went back into the store and bought a EeePC 900 with Ubuntu. I was so proud of myself. :guitar:


A few months ago we hired a new sales guy to re-enforce our sales team. According to what we heard the guy is brilliant at convincing customers to buy whatever he wants them to buy. So far the deals he's coming back with are totally living up to the guy's reputation. We're selling servers and services like mad.

BUT: The guy kept bashing Linux. "Linux is not professional" and all the other FUD. Oh well. He's a sales guy. For as long as he's making sure people buy servers from us (on which Linux and Solaris gets installed ...) we didn't bother too much.

A few days ago I got a phone call. It was my boss. I had to join Mr. "Super Sales Guy" for a product presentation. One customer proved to be particularly stubborn and wasn't convinced by all the sweet-talking our sales guy was doing. The customer insisted to see the product live ...

OK ... so I went there and I of course brought my laptop on which the product was installed inside VirtualBox. So I fired up virtual machine #1 on one side of the cube, virtual machine #2 on another side of the cube (well ... actually it's a cylinder, thanks to the "Cube Deformation" plugin) and a web browser on another side of the cube ... and I started working with the product, showing the features and so on.

And of course ... whenever I switched from one desktop to another the cube/cylinder would rotate .. or unfold ... or thanks to the "Scale" plugin I would see all open windows at once. Or I'd hit Win+E and via "Expo" plugin they were able to see all of my 4 virtual desktops at once ....

Our Mr. Sales Guy was very very very silent.

But the customers (Linux and BSD users themselves as it turned out) were convinced enough so they finally signed the deal.

That evening I received another phone call. My boss again. It seemed that our Mr. Sales Guy had a "very urgent problem" and my boss ordered me: "Help him! I know it's overtime, OK you'll be compensated for that, no problem ... but: Help him!"

OK ... so I called.

You want to know what this super duper hyper urgent problem was?

"My cube isn't working ... how do I enable it?"

After all those stupid comments he made against Linux ... our Mr. Super Sales Guy has switched to Linux. On his own. And installed by himself -- a non-technical user (the guy is a sales person!!). Without any involvement of us techies.

Yet another soul that has seen the light :lol:

VERY nice read....
unfortunately, i'm not one of those who show linux in the right light.. i'm always telling people how good it is, but i tend to break a LOT of things, and my friends notice things breaking left and right because i'm always spending weekends "fixing" something D;

[kevin11951]

VERY nice read....
unfortunately, i'm not one of those who show linux in the right light.. i'm always telling people how good it is, but i tend to break a LOT of things, and my friends notice things breaking left and right because i'm always spending weekends "fixing" something D;

I have the same problem of breaking Ubuntu every chance I get, so anybody who knows me on any sort of personal level will probably never touch Linux in their lives.

[earthpigg]

unfortunately, i'm not one of those who show linux in the right light.. i'm always telling people how good it is, but i tend to break a LOT of things, and my friends notice things breaking left and right because i'm always spending weekends "fixing" something D;


I have the same problem of breaking Ubuntu every chance I get, so anybody who knows me on any sort of personal level will probably never touch Linux in their lives.

who wants to hunt down the xkcd compic i know i am not the only one thinking of?

:guitar:

[Writh]

the USB surgery one?

[abraxas_swa]

I did a couple of weeks' temp work at a publishing company recently. One guy in my department was talking about what a pain in the *** it was constantly having to upgrade his hardware in order to keep up with increasingly bloated software. In particular, he was looking to replace his pretty low-spec laptop. It had Windows installed, but every time he booted the machine he received an error message saying "unable to mount boot volume."

I gave him a Xubuntu live CD, which he tried out and, figuring he couldn't access Windows anyway, attempted to install on the apparently non-functioning hdd. A short time later he had a fully functioning Xubuntu install which automatically detected his wireless network, something that had caused him significant trouble in Windows. Xubuntu ran much faster, video played without skipping and, long story short, the guy just couldn't say enough good things about his experience. It was as if he'd been given a new laptop.

Word of mouth is a very powerful thing. I wonder how many new users he's going to convert?

[gnuvistawouldbecool]

The installing BSD XKCD?

http://xkcd.com/349/

[Dehouston]

Im a new user to Ubuntu. My friend told me i should switch over because my Vista home basic decided it would just stop working. I tried to format and go to XP but vista is stubborn and wont let itself be removed. So i ask my friend what i should do and he tells me that Ubuntu will format it and then you could switch to XP. I installed Ubuntu just to see what it is like. All i can say now is that im not going to XP. :)

Someone needs to bring down the M$ empire.

[MasterNetra]

Im a new user to Ubuntu. My friend told me i should switch over because my Vista home basic decided it would just stop working. I tried to format and go to XP but vista is stubborn and wont let itself be removed. So i ask my friend what i should do and he tells me that Ubuntu will format it and then you could switch to XP. I installed Ubuntu just to see what it is like. All i can say now is that im not going to XP. :)

Someone needs to bring down the M$ empire.

Ubuntu & Most Linux Distros I would think are not about bringing down M$, they are about providing a great OS to people. ^.^ If it brings down the dishonest M$ well then that's a plus.

[jeremyswalker]

Ubuntu & Most Linux Distros I would think are not about bringing down M$, they are about providing a great OS to people. ^.^ If it brings down the dishonest M$ well then that's a plus.

I can certainly agree with your philosophy, but did you have a look at the number one bug in Ubuntu?

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs

[-grubby]

Hey, at least you convinced him with actual examples. Do these things come outta the box with Ubuntu netbook remix, though?

[schauerlich]

who wants to hunt down the xkcd compic i know i am not the only one thinking of?

http://xkcd.com/456/

First result for "xkcd linux" on google.

[OneMixDJ]

Congrats!

As one who has returned to school for higher learning, I've been speaking in support of Linux (especially Ubuntu) to those that think Windows is everything with the kitchen sink.

In one of my classes, we have to use Alice 2.0 for object oriented programming portion of the class. Well, the CD that comes with the book (I believe) is for Windows only (there was nothing on the CD package that indicated that Linux was supported).

With the family laptop being Ubuntu Ibex, I managed to track down the Alice 2.0 package via Google last night, installed it, and it worked like a charm on the first go.

I also have Wireshark, Cisco Packet Tracer, OpenOffice, Firefox, Evolution Email with PDA Sync, Remote Desktop, Gimp, and Pidgin; all in one crappy IBM T22 with a 20GB HD maxxed out with 512MB memory and running well with a wireless connection. I use my flashdrive as needed when doing my homework assignments and I'm good to go.

And I agree with MasterNetra that it's not about bringing down M$ at all because I still have Windows for some things. But at the same time, it seems to me that most of the negativity that I regularly hear regarding Linux seems to come from those who feel that Windows is the only one around the block. And nothing could be farther from the truth than that assumption.

What many fail to get is that all Linux needs to do is just work, that's it.

[clonne4crw]

I understand that people just prefer Windows over Linux. In many cases, I do myself. But it's when people just rip on one operating system (Like Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, etc) that I just get really pissed off. They all have their own place in life.

[mudguts]

I'm in sales. I sell used servers & desktops. Everyday when I sell a used machine, I install Ubuntu, it works, it's easy.

If the dude wants something else, they can do it. But a lot tend to stick with Ubuntu when it's working so well.

it's an awesome community when you get into it. That's all I tell people.