If you are reading this, you most likely have heard of a $150 laptop offered by a Swedish company. I was introduced to this great company by Engadget where you can read up on the laptop if you haven't heard about it. You can also visit the laptop-specific company site at medisoncelebrity.com. The company website can be found at medison.se.
Before you get too excited about the price you should know that people have been ordering these things since the Engadget review on July 25th, but haven't seen a thing. The company has never built any other computer for mass sale (no other desktop or laptop models). The company has a sketchy self-declared history in education. I say it's sketchy because they claim to be the first company in Sweeden to give classes in IT and multimedia on a university. That could be believable if the company had been formed well before the date of 1996 given on its history page.
Medison claims to be selling its laptop everywhere in the world "from Sweden to Brazil" as its website claims. But try to click on the links for different languages at the top right of the main page and the only ones not "under construction" are the English and Portuguese (for Brazil) pages. Any company that wants to be taken seriously by consumers needs to translate its pages for their target audiences. The cost to translate those webpages is so small compared to the potential customers that can be reached that you wonder why they haven't done it yet. At the very least I expect a company website to remove links to languages their pages are not available in.
If you look along the border on the left-hand side of the main company page (medison.se) you see a link to bravenet.com, a free web hosting and web tools company. Wait a second, why does a very large multinational company like Medison need free web hosting? Well, because they work with razor-thin profit margins and can't afford even a hundred bucks a year to properly host their corporate site. The text is often filled with typos (I admit, I have them too). I'm no longer trying to figure out what a pedcogical course is as the Medison page and this one (if it's been indexed yet) are the only two sites Google can find using the word. Instead I'll just assume the good people at Medison have taught pedagogical courses at MidSweden University (a very real, verifiable establishment). Various other slips the company has made can be seen at the wikipedia page.
Medison has been able to garner massive amounts of attention by setting a very low price for a product many consumers want to but at the lowest price. The part that gets to me is that whoever is really behind the Medison name doesn't seem to have made any profit yet. All orders for this very cheap product are placed by credit card through a third-party, U.S.-based ordering service. The answer for the reason Medison exists may lie in the "accessories" page of their product website (see here). Medison may be pocketing some handsome profits from clicks made to advertisements on this page. They may never ship a $150 laptop, but maybe they also may never charge anyone's credit card either.
Update:
I missed this news post when I first posted this story. It appears Medison's website was down long enough for people to believe it had folded. It's back up from what I can tell, and the story doesn't seem to have changed much. It appears that 2Checkout.com will not process new orders from Medison. I still hold that Medison is merely making money off of the advertising on the accessories page.
