Could Free get any cheaper?

We have a sale on several Linux laptops and desktops in our new Sale section:

http://zareason.com/shop/Sale/

The machines that are on sale are ones that were used for a day at a conference or otherwise in a “box opened” state. Sometimes they have a ding or a minor scratch. They are guaranteed and warranted to work just as well as one that was custom built just for you. It’s a great way of saying, “Hey, I got $500 free for this itty bitty scratch on the bottom of the case,” (or whatever the reason is for the item being on the Sale table.

If you have any questions, just let us know: orders@zareason.com and usually we can get you what you need.

Busy

See that 2+ year long gap between last post and this post? That’s what happens when you open up a full-sized office. You get busy.

In those last two years we have:

* hired a full set of staff, truly competent, brilliant people

* filled out the product line, included a divine tablet that is in R&D 20 feet from me as I type

* created, tested and finalized our company standard operating practices

* built a solid foundation on which to spark some explosive growth

We always wanted to take the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach. In Silicon Valley we are surrounded by flash-and-bang start ups and I have a hard time not being judgemental about their immaturity. We wanted to build ZaReason to stand the test of time. We want our children and grandchildren to be able to go into Costco and buy ZaReason devices.

So, a little 2 yr span of blog silence is nothing in the grand scheme.

Thanks for staying tuned and thanks for helping us grow.

Stop

I live in Berkeley, otherwise known as Berzerkely, in sunny California. In this teeny little 10 1/2 square mile patch of earth, we have a large number of people who like to walk and bike (not drive).

On more than a few stop signs around town, people have spray painted a little add-on request:

STOP

driving!

I find it funny and also helpful. I love being in a town where drivers are accustomed to sharing the road with bikers. I love riding my bike. I feel 15 years old when I ride my bike around town. It gets my heart pumping and my brain thinking.
Often, I see people cruising on their bikes, singing some song. You have to see it to believe it — it is usually some regular person just coasting down a sweet little hill, hair streaming behind, singing some song with that relaxed passion that rubs off on everybody who hears them.

Today I saw a STOP sign variation that I had not seen in a while:

STOP

APATHY

I wish I passed by this sign everyday.

Precious little things

This morning we rode our bikes to the best bagel shop in the world.  It is a hidden little shop that you would not find unless someone told you (psst, it’s Berkeley Bagel at 1281 Gilman).

There are more than a few semi-dangerous spots on the road to the bagel shop but we brave it because the bagels are so indescribably good. For some reason, during this morning’s bike ride it occurred to me just how much I trust the cars around me to not run us over. They could so easily destroy us. I got a deep, quick sense of the precious-ness of life and the lives of others with me.

The next thought was that our customers trust us to give them their next laptop or desktop. That’s a similarly powerful trust.

Here’s the reasoning, whether it makes sense or not: Most of what we have and do in life is nearly irrelevent, but there are a few things, a few deeply, dearly precious things in each person’s own little sphere.

The precious parts of my life are health, family, friends, laptop…

Yes, my laptop. Personally, I bond with my laptops. The Toshiba I had when my kids were little was just as much a family member as the kids were. It traveled with me like the kids did. It was at the lunch table, in the car, out at parties, and even in bed with me when I was sick, at the hospital with me when I had my babies, each one. My laptop was an extension of myself, a useful type of appendage with a far more reliable memory than my own. My laptop was an intricate part of my life. I started carrying my laptop with me long before most people were carrying laptops.

When I see computers go out our doors to people in various parts of the world, I realize that those laptops are precious little things going to people who will need them, rely on them, depend on their proper functioning. Powerful trust.

Makes sense? Perhaps it was just the musings of a sleepy Saturday morning on the way to and from the bagel shop, but let it be noted that I do respect people’s computers as precious.

Secret Sauce

On the way to Italy, then on to Israel, I worked a bit on my presentation. I had offered several different topic ideas to the LUG organizer and he chose the most technical one. The topic: Building Linux Hardware. As a how-to, it seemed appropriate to share my company’s favorite suppliers, the best-of-the-best OEMs and where we find the juiciest information on building Linux hardware.

As  I looked at my presentation, it made me worry that maybe I was giving away the proprietary recipe to my company’s Secret Sauce, the thing that makes my company unique.

I went ahead with my Secret Sauce talk (although I didn’t call it that — who knows how that would translate in Hebrew? It might have a different meaning). Happily, bizarrely, unexpectedly, I didn’t give anyway anything they didn’t already know. Instead, it was an exchange of equally informed hardware builders.

See, in Israel, there are no stores. At least, no stores like we’re accustomed to in the US. There’s no Costco, no Best Buy, no Fry’s. They have a different type of consumer activity level and to be honest, I found it a bit refreshing to not be surrounded by stores.

As the wonderfully supportive LUG attendees informed me, in Israel, when you need a computer you go to the little computer shop that’s tucked away in some little spot inbetween buildings. When you need your computer fixed, you ask the kid down the street to take a look at it. I chuckled. This is so much easier than how I have seen many people do it in the US. It goes like this: Drive 30 min to large chain store; stand in line; endure salesmanship; stand in another line; endure the cashier’s “Are you sure you don’t want to give us another $200, er, I mean purchase extended warranty coverage?”; leave; drive another 30 minutes; set up box at home and spend the next two days on the phone to tech support because the box was poorly built in the first place.

In the little shops in Jerusalem in Haifa, you tell the computer shop owner what you want. He builds it for you in front of you. You tell him what parts you want. You know the names of the manufacturers. The builders use mostly whitebox towers. You don’t necessarily care about the big name brands because, after all, you are buying this computer from Omar or Rami, not Best Buy. You know the names of the components and you hear from your friends which ones they like. It all works out. In the process, you get to know what’s what.

I really shouldn’t worry about any Secret Sauce leaks, especially when there are other great cooks in the kitchen.

Linux Foundation End User Summit

I am in New York at the Desmond Tutu conference center’s main hall surrounded by stock exchange people, CEOs, CTOs, bank managers, and lots of big city, big business people. Our meeting is taking place in a large hall that looks exactly like the halls of Hogwarts, a long echoy hall with ornate woodwork, chandeliers, the tinkling clang of china plates and ornate silverware, the works.

At this moment I am listening to Jon Corbet, editor of LWN.net, One of his slides pointed out that we should :

“Avoid uncooperative companies”

I could see everyone around me going through the list in their minds of which companies that see as “uncooperative” in supporting Linux.

I won’t name any.

Linguistics — shifting consumer needs

Have you noticed how language is shifting?

When my two oldest children were little, they said things like, “Ready, set, go,” and “Wait for me!” and “I’ve got to go now, bye!”

Then they got their own computers.

“Ready, set, go,” became, “Ready, play!” since they had latched on to the idea that you press Play to start something. I observed other oddities such as the term, “Wait for me!” shifting to “Pause!”

Much to my amazement, I also heard children on the playground shifting from, “Time to go. Mom’s calling,” to saying, “Time to exit. Mom’s calling.” I cringed when I heard kids say, “Time to quit. Mom’s calling,” because quitting is not ok, yet stopping a computer game is most definitely ok. I knew the game developers (thinking of Sonic in particular) probably had not considered how their choice in terminology would affect child psychology long-term.

Today, I observed something that gave me a glimpse into future product development. My two youngest children were playing Legos with two of their buddies. Their play went like this:

From the 7 year old skateboarder kid: “Hey, I upgraded my jet flyer. Now I have invisibility!”

From the 6 year old electronics geek girl: “My upgrade gave my boosters more power. Ka-boom, whooosh!”

From the visiting friend who was just getting to know our Lego supplies: “I need another upgrade, can I get an upgrade from any of you? Where’d you get those silvery pieces?”

From the other visiting friend with spiky yellow hair and a mischievous grin which makes him look like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes: “You think your upgrade is good? HA. You don’t know nothin. I upgraded mine to explode!”

I found it interesting that their play revolved around the terminology and concept of upgrades. Perhaps this shift is noticeable to me in my generation since I saw how In the past, the toy selection for kids was not malleable. Batman was just Batman in a cool costume with cool gear. You couldn’t buy extras for him or give him a boost in any way. In contrast, now nearly everything my kids own can be improved, built on, and in a word, upgraded as needed. These kids are aware of and even expect that the things in their environment can be, perhaps must be, improved.

What does this mean for us as consumers and creators? That the days of stagnant playthings is gone. A computer must be upgradable, thus our open hardware warranty. I am watching this play out the same way I watch a movie or some other good story line. Will the open hardware warranty work? It is working wonderfully for now. Will it have longevity?

We will see.

Branding something without a name

Branding can be wildly fun, but it is tough, tough, tough. I like to compare it to snowboarding — you are either good at it or you realize that it is a sport for people with far more mojo in their boots.

Branding takes time, creative energy, heaps of research, and in most cases, a lot of money. During the time we were picking our company name, the comment was floated, “Hey, you know [name of company] spends upwards of $40,000 just to generate a good name for a new product?”

I was never comfortable spending significant money generating sleek product names — I chose to invest in quality hardware and hoped that customers valued quality over marketing. I think I was right. Time will tell; this strategy is now part of who we are.

I came across a validating point today that I found comforting and quite interesting. My CTO, Earl, was working with a manufacturer building new Linux keyboards. (Background: About a year ago, we pioneered the Ubuntu keyboard, replacing the Windows logo on the Start key with an Ubuntu logo. We were the first and only to do that. It was fun and I will tell you more about it in an upcoming post.) For our new Linux keyboard, we had the penguin graphic looking spunky and solid, but we noticed that manufacturer’s mock-up of the keyboard contained an Internet Explorer hotkey at the top left of the board.

My comment, said with hands on hips: “Well, now, that just won’t do.”

So, we began considering graphics to use to signify the glorious world wide web.

In Google Images, I searched for “www” and the results were shockingly lame. I googled “world wide web” and the results were a little better with a few globes and the like.

My comment, said with hand thoughtfully on chin: “The web sure doesn’t have a branding manager.”

It occurred to me that when you build something so highly useful, you do not need a solid product image. Of course this is an extreme example, but it does lead the way into what happens when you:

1. let something grow organically,

2. allow it to exist without pressure-marketing, and

3. build it so that quality is customer driven.

Perhaps you have already considered this fact, but it was a bit of a revelation to me. Everyone, myself included, is grappling for The Open Source Business Model yet here is the engine that makes nearly everything we do to communicate with each other possible and it doesn’t even have a brand.

It really is a wildly beautiful, rebellious thing.

Why are you called “ZaReason”?

Oh boy, I love this question.

I love this name.

There are so many ways to get to the reason why this name was picked as it was and since I have your rapt attention, I will take the most enjoyable route (for me at least).

We brainstormed for a company name for months. They all sounded dorky; some were so dorky they made me laugh until I cried. Most were so boring I couldn’t remember them even though I thought of them. So, with nearly every possible name crossed off the list, we were at a dead-end.

We knew how to build the hardware, but we could not have a company if we could not even name it.

One afternoon, we were sitting around and someone was cracking jokes, I forget who. Vincent and Kory, both fluent Latin speakers, were brainstorming for names in Latin, “Statuere, that means ‘to stand’ in Latin. That could work…”

This was so much harder than building hardware to run Ubuntu.

I brought up the fact that the name needed to translate well into all languages. Vincent asked, “Which languages? Which countries?” As if I could name all the countries I wanted to branch out into!

So, since I speak French and am completely enthralled with the way the French are fostering Linux adoption, I said in my best French-girl-speaking-English accent, “All za countries ma darling.”

He replied with something like, “And za reason for that would be…?”

At that moment, we realized in a sort of group ah-ha that “ZaReason” sounded so much like “Zary Zen” a character created by one of our team members, Kory, in various games he played. We loved Zary Zen. We adored Zary Zen. The name evoked happy, playful memories for us personally.

The name became official a few seconds later when Earl commented, “Hey, ZA is the country code for South Africa. Ubuntu. Shuttleworth. South Africa. Yeah.”

I commented, “And ‘reason’ translates well in all European languages that I can think of off the top of my head.”

My youngest, my daughter, my much-adored little LinuxChix piped up, “ZaReason! ZaReason! I love you!”

I was sold.

Everyone else was convinced when they googled the name and gasped audibly at the purity of it. There wasn’t a single hit for ZaReason. We had not even dared to hope for such good luck.

Hopefully the sound of the name is fun for you too. I take great pleasure in seeing people pronounce it, play with it, and let it roll off their tongue like in the playful song “Bulbous Bouffant”. The name is memorable and has endless potential for good humor.

My favorite company motto so far: “Za reason for za open source is za freedom!”

Teenagers, penguins, and video clips

Christian Einfeldt of Digital Tipping Point filmed me telling a few of our family stories. Normally, I am quiet camera shy, but Christian has a way of putting everyone at ease, so here you go: Join the others who have viewed me babble on gloriously.

Note that the penguin-throwing at the beginning of the video clip was purposeful. I was conducting a mini focus group testing the following:

* How well the penguins held up to regular use. (We all know kids throw their stuffed animals as much as they hug them.)

* How quickly the penguins got dirty. Shockingly enough, they are still just as crisp-white as the moment when the kids first picked them up!

* The quality of stitching. Many, many years ago, I worked briefly as a speciality seamstress for a custom children’s clothing designer. It is a pet peeve of mine to look for inadequate stitching and point out, “Ah ha! I told you it was low-quality.” The Open Animal penguins did not give me the satisfaction. They are extremely well built.