February 1st 2006, Gigastrand International* was founded. At the time, Linspire was the flagship operating system product, and Gigastrand’s mission was simply Linux advocacy through sales and support. That same month, Gigastrand attended the very last Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego.
Linspire logo
Linspire folded in 2007. After looking at creating a Gigastrand distribution and evaluating several existing distributions (including a short-lived distro called Klikit) Linux Mint KDE became the new flagship OS.
From 2008 – 2011, Gigastrand simply existed while it tried and failed at several grand ideas. Some stuck, some didn’t. For those years Gigastrand survived off of the remnant sales of freespire and Linux Mint discs it sold online. Some Ebay and Zazzle sales helped pay for the website.
Then, in 2012, Gigastrand caught several breaks. Ventures into a short-lived wholesaling gig and PC servicing helped generate more revenue than in previous years.
In September of 2012, founder Josh Tordsen rebooted Gigastrand and added services from his previous venture, Gigabytes Computer Store, which he had closed in May 2006. With a small $3000 initial investment, Gigastrand broke sales records year after year. Recently, December 2015, January 2016, and projected sales for February 2016 shatter all previous sales records for those months in the company’s history.
Gigastrand OS Alpha .04
As a part of the reboot, Gigastrand reinvented its Linux advocacy plan by revisiting the idea of Gigastrand OS. It developed the Gigastrand OS into 1.0 and released it January 4th 2014. Six months later, July 14th, 2014, saw the release of Gigastrand OS 2.0 and September 1, 2015 Gigastrand released v3.0 – the first 64 bit version of the operating system.
The effort in developing the OS has been enormous but the results have been encouraging. Gigastrand OS set out to make Linux as easy as possible for everyone. The developers have taken over a decade of trying to convert people to Linux using various distros and incorporated what people want.
Gigastrand’s Best selling PC
The numbers are impressive as well. In the last half of 2015, 100% of new and used computers had Gigastrand OS on them. Since Gigastrand OS 1.0 was released, over 10,000 people have downloaded the operating system. In 2 years of new and used PC sales with Gigastrand OS we have seen a 98% adoption rate and a 0% attrition rate on new computers.
Gigastrand’s bread and butter continues to be technology management and security. It allows the company to focus on development of new solutions like the Gigastrand OS.
Gigastrand Network Video Recorder Software
What does the future hold for Gigastrand? According to founder Josh Tordsen, a lot.
“Our focus in 2016 will be software. A new version of the Gigastrand OS with more features is not out of the question before the end of 2016. More immediately, we are on schedule to release the Gigastrand NVR software for recording security cameras by the end of February then, in March, we will start porting some Windows software we own to Gigastrand OS.”
In short, Gigastrand continues its original mission of Linux advocacy while adding products and services to an ever-expanding technical portfolio. Gigastrand has had many ups and downs but it continues to move forward.
*In 2015 Gigastrand has dropped the “International” part of its name though some remnants of the old name can still be found.
Gigastrand Celebrates 10 years of Linux Advocacy
No comments:
Post a Comment