This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. This series of segments features interviews with the David and Mark Silverman, the owners of Sub300.com, North America’s first Linux-only computer store! Yep, no Microsoft. No Mac. The slogan for their store is “Costs less, no Microsoft mess.” LOL!! These guys are really smart. Their store is tiny, so they keep their costs low. The store, which is called Sub500.com in Canadian marketing, iis run out of a car wash where they also sell bagels and coffee. The guys joke about their love of Trifecta days, which is days when they can sell a car wash, bagels, and a computer all to the same customer.

The genius of this approach is that they are getting the jump on the GNU Linux desktop market, so that when the real digital tipping point happens, they will have deep expertise and broad channels and contacts for the sale of GNU Linux. Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen has looked at other “disruptive innovations” such as GNU Linux, and his research shows that early entrants in a disruptive market tend to dominate when that market takes off.

Will the digital tipping point ever happen? If so, will the Silverman brothers be the next Dell computer? Dunno. But the Digital Tipping Point crew is betting that the real digital tipping point will happen, and we will be following the Silverman brothers and providing you, our audience, with footage when it does happen. In the meantime, here it is. The proverbial garage. We always hear rumors of how big businesses get started in someone’s garage. You can’t get much closer to a garage than a car wash. This is the real deal!

By the way, the store is called Sub300.com in US marketing, but Sub500.com in Canadian marketing, due to the differences in the markets for the US and Canadian currencies.

If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeld@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at gmail.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_241

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 003, Sub300.com
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

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