First Internet Appliance With BeIA - From Sony?

A reader writes: "SONY has announced at CES2001, their "Network Entertainment Center", eVilla, which is basically an Internet appliance powered by BeIA. For an enlarged screenshot, zing has got some. For more information, visit eVilla's homepage www.evilla.com. An Internet appliance with a journaled filesystem, not bad."

Comments

Okay... but who's really going to care?

[Yu Suzuki]

Companies have been pitching this whole "Internet appliance" for the past five years, and it still hasn't caught on. WebTV was supposed to revolutionize TV and the Internet, and it hasn't made a dent in either. It's pretty apparent that no matter what some corporate visionary says, consumers just don't want "Internet appliances." They'd rather have a PC that also does word processing, or a music player that also plays CDs, or a game console for gaming...

Internet appliances are a classic example of a misguided inventor trying to use technology to fill a need that doesn't exist. Few people are going to buy a Internet appliance just because it's shiny and new, and there's no real void the systems fill. You can already get Internet access through your PC, a device at least a third of all Americans now own.

Everything an Internet console does can be duplicated by more feature-rich systems. Believe it or not, most people are actually capable of turning on computer and clicking on their web page. It's just "all-in-one" home entertainment systems like the ill-fated 3D0 or PS2 -- companies expected them to be a big hit because they're simple, but no one needed one. People are smarter than you think.

The most successful products are the ones that fulfill an actual desire. Granted, sometimes consumers don't really know they'd benefit from the introduction of a given product until it's actually introduced, but the long history of failures that "Internet appliances" have met indicates that there's not much interest in these kind of products.

Neat to see BeIA getting some use, though...

Yu Suzuki