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A Litl Redux

After my Thursday column about the litl, readers pointed my attention to a blog post where the folks at litl (all lowercase) further defended their reasons for its rather top-heavy $700 price point. I went in expecting some real meat for discussion. I came away with a nearly empty plate.

My biggest complaints about the litl are simple enough. It's too much money for too little machine, and too easily outgunned in its price class by commodity PCs that do far more. The blog post attempts to explain why the pricetag is high, starting with the screen:

The screen is the most expensive component of a computer. Our screen is better than netbooks. First of all it’s larger. Second, our 178 degree viewing cone enables viewing from any angle which very beneficial at home. Most netbooks have inexpensive screens with narrow viewing cones. Lastly, our screen is much brighter. Some might not need a great screen but if you like to see family photos or video without distortion then you want our screen.

First off, most of the comparisons people are apt to draw are not going to be with other netbooks per se, but with other computers in the same price class. Many of those machines have displays that are at least as big, if not bigger. My own $899-or-so Sony Vaio has a 15"+ widescreen display. (Also, if one of the big draws of the litl is plugging it into an HDMI TV to show photos, then the size of the screen isn't terribly relevant there.)

Then there's the support and maintenance question:

litl provides services you don’t get with current netbooks. We’re maintenance free. You never need to worry about viruses, updates, downloads, plug-ins, security patches, etc. We do that for you for the life of the machine. By self-updating at night your computer is always ready to go. Not important? Well, how about saving hours of time doing tech support for your mother-in-law. Now how much would you pay!

True, and very laudable. The problem is that this comes at the cost of the machine running a very deliberately restricted set of software. This isn't a bad plan -- pace the iPhone -- but the iPhone has a user culture and a hardware maker behind it that help offset the steep pricetag. litl doesn't -- not yet, anyway -- and such things are next to impossible to conjure up our of thin air.

litl provides all server side OS services for free. Most netbooks don’t have server side OS services. Server side OS services solve, among other things, the syncing problem. You can link litls and automatically share content. That means photos and channels are available on any litl: in your bedroom, kitchen, on your TV, or in your mom’s house across the country. Content is automatically updated and displayed.

Most netbooks don't provide such services because they're free for the taking or dirt cheap: Mozy, for instance, if you're talking about data backup. Such things may not be directly integrated with the system by default, but that's a red herring: few people expect to shell out for those things ahead of time because they're trivially simple to add.

Then comes the local storage issue. This one, I fear, had me rolling my eyes.

... we don’t have hard drives but you’d have to pay me to use one! Hard drives are the number one point of failure in machines and the cause of catastrophic unhappiness.

Last I checked, user error was the number one point of failure in most computers, with users unthinkingly running as administrator being a big part of that. Hardware failure comes in a distant second or third, depending on how you add it up. The last time a hard drive blew up on me was more than six years ago, but I've mistakenly torched my own data more times than I can count. (Thank goodness for backups). Leaving out a hard drive on the grounds that it's an invitation to disaster is like never coming out of your house because that's a fine way to get struck by lightning.

People shop for computers by price and budget, not exclusively by functionality. Most people are not going to look at the litl and make any comparisons to netbooks at all; they're going to compare it to full-blown notebooks costing about as much. And they're going to find it severely wanting.

I like the way the litl leverages open source, which is a big part of what got me curious about it. But leveraging open source doesn't make up for a really badly thought-out marketing plan, or a pricetag that simply doesn't reflect real-world need and use.

InformationWeek Analytics outlines the 10 questions you need to ask to see where netbooks fit within your organization. Download the report here (registration required).

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