While the Medison Celebrity $150 laptop was obviously a good idea, it was — as some have noticed — very, very poorly executed. While debates on whether or not it’s actually at all possible to produce a laptop that cheap are still heated, I don’t think anyone disagrees that a $150 laptop would be nothing but great.

Unfortunately, Valdi Ivancic (CEO and president of Medison Europe Ltd.) is the kind of man who gets the idea, but doesn’t have any of the resources to pull it off — far from it. In this particular event he did try to pull it off, not knowing that his rather unimpressive past (to say the least) would be researched and analyzed, and all his references — and even his tax records — checked. When people (particularly on the internet) are dealing with a new company selling something that’s almost too good to be true, it’s not unusual to at least do a bit of Googling around on the company history and the history of the CEO. In this case it was the story of some 3, maybe 4, companies who’d never paid their taxes and usually ended up declaring bankruptcy. The company website (medison.se) and the product website (medisoncelebrity.com) weren’t exactly impressive either — they looked like something produced in Frontpage Express and that’s probably me being a bit generous. In general, from the beginning everything looked a bit shady.

However, around 7000 people ordered the laptop through 2CheckOut (though Valdi claimed quite a different figure) and a long waiting ensued. 3 months after the first orders (with a promised delivery time of 4–6 weeks) the laptops had still to be shipped. Finally 2CheckOut lost their patience with Valdi and canceled some orders that had been marked as shipped by Medison, but apparently wasn’t even close to shipping, so 2CheckOut simply canceled the orders and refunded the money. The latest news is that 2CheckOut has suspended Medison’s account, thus Medison is now without a way to accept orders/payments. So is this the end of the story?

Judging from Valdi’s behavior throughout this whole ordeal and the facts that:

• most (all?) of his references on his CV (page 1, page 2) are made up
• he’s applied for Head of Tourism in Blekinge attaching the aforementioned CV
• he ran for Swedish prime minister in 2006

all more or less point toward a person with no real hold in reality, so what should stop him from finding another way to receive orders/payments? He’s already complained that sceptic bloggers (like myself) and media have made it really hard for Medison to keep appearing trustworthy and that the bad press is ruining their relations to and deals with business partners, so I think this would be the time for him — if he has any sense of realism left — to officially announce that Medison is giving up on the whole affair because of the bad press. That way he can walk away from all of this and still convince himself that it was the bad press that killed his project, not poor execution. On the other hand, he’s been really stubborn all along, so he might make one or two last futile attempts at bringing the $150 laptop to the world.

The whole story is actually a lot more complicated and can be followed in greater detail on medisonscam.info (and remember, you can’t send that link via MSN Messenger), I’m just giving a very brief outline in order to get to my point.

As we know, pointing out mistakes when they have been made, is a lot easier than before they’re made, so why not look at what Valdi and Medison could have done to have come off as more trustworthy.

• No one has ever seen a photo of the laptops Valdi claims exist somewhere in Asia. Through the amazing digital technology of our time, Valdi could have someone at the plant take a shot of a couple of laptops — perhaps some packaging too — and email them to him, so he could post them on the website.
• If you really want a laptop to become popular, you need for it to get some attention. Usually this is done by shipping out a few demo models to reviewers in popular computer/tech magazines. The only “demo model” of the Medison Celebrity the world has ever seen, was at a press conference in August where Valdi showed off his Clevo with Czech keyboard, a demonstration model he received from a European Clevo vendor. At least he took the time and effort to remove the Clevo branding and the serial number from it before presenting it to the press.
• Valdi could have been a bit more open about how he was going about producing the laptop and the numbers and figures involved. Lying about the number of unique hits on the website when your web host’s Webalizer statistics shows something completely different and is available to the general public doesn’t really inspire trust. Likewise with the number of sold laptops. Valdi’s roughly 300.000 versus 2CheckOut’s roughly 7000 doesn’t exactly point to a trustworthy CEO.

Now if Valdi was as smart as his CV would have us believe, then he’d have known that when you try to sell something that appears too good to be true on the internet, people will usually assume that it’s not true, so any relatively sane person, would probably see this coming and have some sort of strategy for backing up the claims and proving the existence/legitimacy of the product in question, but Valdi did not. Of course, as with any imaginary product, there’s not a whole lot of options available for proving any actual existence.

All these things aside, I can’t help but think what would have happened if everyone had taken a slightly different approach to the idea of a $150 laptop. In this particular instance of “a $150 laptop” I think the approach (namely scepticism) taken by many, was correct, but had Valdi not been Valdi and Medison not Medison, maybe — just maybe — it could be pulled off.

Let’s, for a moment, assume that a more reputable company, like Acer, IBM or Apple, started pre-selling a $150 (ex. shipping) laptop while stating that they’d need at least, say, 100,000 orders in order to be able to actually produce it without losing any insane amount of money. (Now stay with me, this is purely hypothetical and thought up numbers, I’m merely speculating.) When ordering bulks of 100,000, surely you can get some kind of Good Deal™, especially if your name and reputation is already well-established. Maybe you could make the sales of the $150 laptop go in at just about 0, but make some extra bucks by selling accessories and services, like .Mac, extra batteries, bluetooth adapters, external CD-/DVD-drives, bigger hard drives, extra RAM, additional software etc. According to Valdi, this — and ad revenues — was how it was supposed to work; without the pre-sale threshold though, and I actually don’t think that’s entirely impossible, but I’m just a linguist speculating in a domain that I’m completely unfamiliar with.

I don’t think Valdi ever had the intention of scamming anyone, if he did, why choose a well-known and widely used payment provider like 2CheckOut? (I know, some have speculated that he might have someone from 2CheckOut in on the scam, but I really think that’s over-elaborate speculation and seems to be just that; speculation without any real evidence.) And why choose to appear so much in public (eg. at the press conference) if you know you’re about to become a wanted criminal? Why on earth let everybody know who you are and how you look? If this is a scam, it’s about as poorly executed as is humanly possible. Valdi is not a scammer, he’s a pathological liar — an ambitious one at that, one might say — and possibly one of the worst and unrealistic businessmen to ever walk this earth, and last, but not least, he’s involuntarily become a great entertainer on the Internet. It’s kinda sad to see this whole thing slowly come to an end, and it is coming to an end, unless Valdi by some stroke of genius becomes able to ship around 7000 laptops very soon, since I’ve very much enjoyed following this whole thing, albeit I felt a bit sorry for Valdi at times. But hey, at least he tried. Hopefully someone will see the amount of attention this has drawn and perhaps try to make an actual $150 laptop – or maybe just a $200 laptop. If anyone ever succeeds in doing it (at least in a way similar to what Valdi tried), they ought to give a little credit to the raving mad Swedish “businessman” who couldn’t.