OpenMac & Psystar Reeks of A Publicity Stunt

April 15, 2008

I was writing a post this morning over at PCMech about OpenMac and why it’s going to fail. As I wrote that post, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that this was a complete and total scam. It is a play to get a boatload of attention.

Of course, I can’t prove it. But, then this evening I saw a post over at Guardian asking who Psystar really is. This post didn’t necessarily confirm my suspicions, but it surely solidified them.

Psystar has no business record. Their office location has apparently changed mid-stream. A phone call produced nothing. The quotes I put onto my PCMech story this morning seem to be geared precisely to stir up controversy.

So, this whole thing just reeks of a publicity stunt.

The Mac culture is a passionate one, just like the Linux crowd. And, these guys know full well that deliberately playing to that whole controversy of “Macs are expensive” is going to get them lots of attention.

And it worked. You can see in my prior post that PCMech managed to get onto Digg in a big way yesterday. But, the story on OpenMac, from the MacRumors.com site, was right ahead of our story. The Psystar site got hammered so much that it took their site offline for some time on Monday.

So, this company comes out of nowhere and gets featured in a Digg top story. It comes out deliberately rocking the boat. Apple, for it’s part, isn’t even responding yet.

Is this whole thing a publicity stunt?

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