In a telephone conversation on Monday (January 15) Hine said
that the company plans to develop software. ‘I can’t disclose too
much about the new project,’ said Hine. ‘We’re talking to investors
and so on. I can tell you that it’s in the software management
arena; it came out of some technology we developed in the course of
selling the laptops, particularly the OneStep Linux.'”
“Selling Linux on laptops isn’t the innovation that it used to
be, and that could be part of the reason Tuxtops is changing its
focus. From his home in Sunnyvale, Hine shared some of the
reasoning behind the decision to suspend sales of laptops. ‘[It]
was a difficult business to maintain. The competition was growing,
including big companies — when we started there were very few
competitors.'”
“Nowadays, the big guys like IBM and HP are offering buyers the
option to have their notebook systems shipped with Linux, so it’s
hard for ‘little’ guys like Tuxtops, and other small companies like
Linuxlaptops.com to keep up. ‘A lot of companies want to buy [all
their hardware] from one place,” Hine said. “We have better
products than those big guys, but it’s really hard to convince
somebody who’s not on top of the situation that we really are
better. We were critically acclaimed but unfortunately, that
doesn’t make up for lack of volume.'”