ZaReason not Stocking Everex Cloudbook - CEO Clarifies

by atticus ~ February 24, 2008

The news about ZaReason dropping Cloudbook started circulating when interested buyers received the following email reply from ZaReason:

Due to the amount of money we have lost granting refunds (due to bank transaction fees) we can no longer sell the Cloudbook. You may be able to find it through other vendors but we can not guarantee stock. We are refocusing our efforts on laptops and desktops that we build ourselves over which we have complete control and which we have never missed a product launch. Trustworthy delivery of Linux hardware is the core of our business.

Needless to say, it has generated a fair amount of discussion. Cathay Malmrose, CEO of ZaReason, clarified the issue in Cloudbooker:

Thanks for everything you’re doing getting the word out about the Cloudbook, but can I clarify a bit? We still support Everex whether we carry their products or not. They have done what no other established OEM has had the guts to do — they put their resources whole-heartedly behind a Linux distro. We will continue to cheer for them and a few other OEMs in the background.

In a very short time (note the complete lack of specificity on that) everyone will be able to buy the Cloudbook from big vendors like New Egg, Walmart and others. The boom will hit and everyone will be toting around their Cloudbooks in their pockets like this guy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9609130@N03/ (That’s a prototype we had with us.)

We decided to refocus on building our own systems because:

1. We’re custom builders, not a fulfilment facility. We weren’t sure until near the end of the development process if we would be able to allow upgrades on memory, etc. We sure wanted to but due to the ultrasmall size of the Cloudbook we can’t offer upgrades. Being incurable hardware geeks, we have to be able to upgrade. Without that, it didn’t fit our business model.

2. We just launched in the EU today. We need to focus.

3. Plenty of other vendors will have it and can manage order fulfilment just fine on their own turnaround schedules. We have an ultra tight 24 to 48 hour turnaround on custom systems which is the engine of our business. Case in point: We stocked the gPC and were able to fit that nicely into our product line because nearly everyone who purchased the gPC from us also requested an upgrade. It fit.

The bottomline is that the Everex people are good people making remarkable progress. One staffer put it well, “Think about it — the first delay was due to an upgrade in the software, then the weather, of all things, delayed the launch. How can you say, “It’s the weather’s fault” and not laugh?”

No worries. All things considered, we are all doing our respective jobs creating better Linux-focused hardware.

ZaReason confirmed the clarification posted by their CEO:

While we still support and admire the Cloudbook, Everex and the community that is bubbling around it, we are not stocking it. There’s a great explanation posted on Cloudbooker, comment #10 by our CEO, Cathy Malmrose.

We have to thank ZaReason for taking the effort to clarify. Cloudbook UMPC wishes them all the best, especially in their recent venture into EU!