The Edge at Micro Centers

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Micro Center is a chain of nineteen compuer gear stores in thirteen states. You find them where techies are concentrated: Santa Clara, Tustin, Madison, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Cambridge, Fairfax. You find them online, too, at microcenter.com.

If you go into their stores, you now find desktop Linux doing something more than bringing down the price of some bottom-end Windows-less PC. Desktop Linux is actually featured. Or, in retail lingo, merchandised.

When the decision to promote desktop Linux was made, Kevin Jones, VP of Merchandising for Micro Center, sent out a letter that said, "We know we can't just randomly plunk new desktop Linux computers around our vast stores and expect them to sell well. To become viable, a product line has to have to be prominently displayed, easy to test drive, and be backed by both a knowledgeable sales person and post-sale service and support. Micro Center's retail model is based on the 'store within a store' concept -- products are housed in their own separate sections within the store, where trained Micro Center staff can respond to questions about the specific products in their sections."

This progress isn't limited to the chain's offline stores. A search for "linux" at microcenter.com brings up thirteen pages of results. And if you want to know one reason why the online store performs so well, go do "What's this site running?" at Netcraft.

Eleven servers come up, all running Linux.

- Doc Searls