Plasma-Active pre-installed

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Mario,

On Monday, December 12, 2011 16:09:21 Mario Fux wrote:
> I know that's a bit on the last minute as IIRC tomorrow is the release of
> PA Two. So here in short my proposal or thing:
> My company (which atm consists just of myself and I ;-) will ship PA pre-
> installed on the PointOfView TAB-TEGRA-10-1 including a 8GB microSD Card.
> The device and offer is of course targeted to developers and bleeding edge
> users (and not yet end users). The price would be 350 CHF or 290 EUR
> (excl. shipping) and 5 EUR of each sold device will go (as with the other
> simple computers on asimplecomputer.com) to KDE e.V. (and another 5 EUR
> either to PA directly or to
> MER, don't know yet enough about the MER structure). I hope this doesn't
> interfere with any plans of the PA companies and as an 10inch device it
> shouldn't interfere with your 7inch tablets (which I'm still interested in
> of course). So would this be of interest for you and your announcement
> tomorrow? Thus you could even fulfil your idea/annoucement (as done in
> Randa and other places) of shipping a preinstalled device with PA till the
> end of the year... ;-).

I'd like to know more about it, hoping you can share this information here. My 
basic concerns are quality and Plasma Active's brand value. When Plasma Active 
becomes available as a real product, I really want it to be good. There's a 
bunch of unknowns for me there, which you might be able to clear up, or maybe 
you haven't thought about that in detail, yet.

- Do you create, test and support your own OS images? Is there a process of 
quality control? How do you escalate functional problems? If a product 
featuring Plasma Active gets on the market, and these questions haven't been 
answered, you'll just nuke brand value and make it very hard to succeed with 
Plasma Active in the future -- for anybody.

- What's your upgrade story? The initial shininess does wear off, and as 
Plasma Active progresses, people will need and want upgrades. If there's no 
after-sales support (for example supported software upgrades even after 14 
months), people will be disappointed, and that will reflect badly on Plasma 
Active -- and scorge commercial ground for others.

- Also, how do you intend to give back to Plasma Active? I read that you 
intend to donate 5€ sold device to KDE e.V., but see this only as very 
indirect contribution to Plasma Active. The people working on PA have all 
invested a lot of time, energy and money. In my opinion, if you want to expoit 
PA commercially, you should first show the same kind of commitment.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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