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Shanda Box vs. Microsoft Venus After Six Years?
Luyi Chen asks: "Shanda revealed their new PC entertainment center (aka Shanda Box) at China International Consumer Electronics Show (SinoCES) last Friday. It's strategy is to move Internet content to TV. Six years ago, Microsoft Venus was to provide a cheap operating system with basic information processing ability for the TV set-top market. While Microsoft focused on reducing the price, Shanda focuses on reducing the entry level. Both strategies are based on the fact that the number of TVs dwarfs the number of PCs in China, which won't change in six years. What is different is that we have faster hardware, more Internet content and users. Amazingly enough, Microsoft's Venus didn't make it out of the laboratory. Does Slashdot think Shanda will succeed where Microsoft thought it would fail?"
Seriously. Never heard of either.
I have a cold and hear V's as P's, you insensitive clod!
rotten resolution, if apple II didn't look good on the old Philco in the living room, why would dark-blue on blue web pages? I don't get this. sounds like somebody wrote down a dream on toilet paper when they got up, and it doesn't translate into reality.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...sounds like a very weak beer.
The big American companies line up to sell to the vast Chinese market -- Microsoft, Google, E-bay, all mentioned in the accompanying article.
Is the problem the cost of displays? Seems like the cost of cheap displays should be approaching the competitve point with TV-PCs. For instance, I thought with the MIT $100 PC would be competitive with this Shanda idea -- which, according to the article, will not be released, identified, or priced!
It seems there are several technologies converging on third-world markets. I wonder if those will find their way into China and compete with this product?
Tzhe Disease Of IT
All it'll take is for some nationalist in the PRC to get a bug up their ass and Microsoft won't be legally allowed to participate without at least a heavy barrier to entry into the market. I wouldn't mind seeing Microsoft succeed because I'm an American and I don't want the communists to get richer at our expense.
It'd be good for the US and China to get into a trade war NOW while China still doesn't have too much leverage against us. Yeah, they could do a good bit of damage, but nothing we couldn't recover from within five to ten years from. However, the fact remains that China has allowed us very little access to their markets while demanding access to our markets. It'd be nice to see Bush actually pull one of his "homeland security" initiatives by getting a law passed that mandates a major US divestment from China. Why we're investing in a country that is belligerant toward Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, three of our largest trade partners and three good allies is beyond me.
What China is proving today is that free market capitalism doesn't inherently lead toward freedom. The people have to really want it and use the free market as a means to get ahead toward that freedom. The Shanda Box succeeding may make life a little bit better for some people in China, but at the same time it'll also help fund the weapons that'll probably kill thousands in Taiwan if and when the PLA invades Taiwan before 2008.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
All of a sudden we're experts on the Chinese internal market?
Inside China? Who knows? The State might just force all its citizens to buy it at gunpoint.
Outside China? Probably not.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
A _CHEAP_ OS from _MICROSOFT_? Is that possible?
What is the same is that unless the Shanda folks are assuming that the number of HDTVs is going to also dwarf the number of PCs in China, it doesn't matter how fast the set-top box is: Surfing teh Intarweb, whether you do it in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, is going to be teh suck. It's bad enough trying to read ASCII characters at resolutions comparable to 640x480 -- can you imagine trying to read Chinese characters?
Sometimes you can leapfrog technology - as China did with wireless telephones vs. land lines.
Problem is, you can only do it when it's cheaper to set up the new technology (cheap transmission towers in the middle of nowhere) than the old one (a hunk of fiber or copper, to every home, multiplied by a billion users).
Barring a miracle in materials science, we're not going to see HDTV sets eclipsing TV in China. We're therefore, I think, not going to see "Internet TV" taking off in any big way, either.
For 90% of the target market, the only thing that matters is if it can display dhtml, flash , javascript, and multimedia as well as IE 6 Running on Windows 98 or better. Another 8% will use it if it can do these things as well as Firefox. Otherwise the target market will go down to the local internet cafe and just use ie6 on windows.
The only platform people are somewhat willing to compromise on is their mobile phone. They can't carry around their windows pc in their pocket so they'll settle for less. For the rest it will be not worth it.
It's kind of like the office suite market. The only question that matters is does the thing read and write word flawlessly every time. If it works 99% of the time it better be free or else nobody will use it.
Some form of web tv will eventually catch on and bring with it new problems. There should be a betting pool on the date of the first television virus, possibly one which hijacks the display to present spam advertising.
Loose lips lose spit.
You go girl!
Shanda VS. Venus, sounds like a catfight at a strip club.
a TV strip club.
Starsucks
said the submitter: What is different is that we have faster hardware, more Internet content and users. Amazingly enough, Microsoft's Venus didn't make it out of the laboratory.
We? The article started as "Shanda did this", and then transitioned to "we did this". You see, if you're trying to plug your technology by making it appear like a legitimate Ask Slashdot, at least have the courtesy to pretend to be impartial. That and pitting it against a Microsoft research product that never existed outside the lab (six years ago) as if you're competing with it. This has to be one of the worst plugs I've seen.
Think you misspelt Mom :)
Does Slashdot think Shanda will succeed where Microsoft thought it would fail?"
MS failed/fails because it is MS. Load of crap to think anything else.
Shanda will succeed because it knows it's markets...very simple.
I'm in agreement with the other posters in that if China wants a really cheap PC to be both the entertainment center as well as the TV center - then let them use a cheap PC with a TV video card in it. After all, you can get a PC for around $200.00 now on-line and a cheap monitor (CRT at least) on-line as well. The whole thing can sit in the entertainment center or shelves and then they'd have a decent picture as well as a way to play games if they wanted.
There are only a few problems with this though:
1. China still has a huge number of farmers who do not have electricity.
2. Most of the people living outside of the major cities have hardly any money at all and get most of their news from radios or TVs which are run by generator and are communal radios/TVs.
3. Unlike the US - the people of China do not have the "I've gotta have it!" kind of outlook. It is more like how the US used to be. The "If it won't solve my problems I don't want it." kind of outlook. And their major problems are food, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Electricity would be nice but just having enough fuel to keep the fire burning is better in some areas. (I'm not saying all of China is backwards or anything like that. Just that in some areas they live with the land and have more basic needs than some electronic gadget.)
There was a story about Africa from some years back. (I know a couple of them actually.) Anyway, people thought that it would be a great idea to send tractors over so the people of Africa could plow the fields and produce more goods. Only they forgot that there weren't any oil refineries, gas stations, and the like in place yet. So all of the equipment just sat and rusted away. This situation is similar to that problem (IMHO). There are huge numbers of people who live so far below the poverty line that we tend to just push them out of our minds. So a few million people in China may be able to buy a box to watch TV and play games with. Well, what about the other 3.5 Billion people who are just trying to make it day by day? They aren't going to buy anything.
Unless we treat them like we do some of the other countries. Where we give them our money so they can buy our products. Sounds crazy I know, but the US does that to several countries. As far as I can tell, we do that to help jumpstart those countries' economies. But that's just my opinion. What's yours?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The Shanda Box article makes no mention of Microsoft, but Slashdot just had to present this "Shanda Box spotted at SINOCES" news as a "vs Microsoft" issue. LOL You guys should see a therapist to get over your Microsoft obsession. ;-)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The fact is that Microsoft is still very commited to IPTV check this out http://msntv.com/pc/
esilva
...all your TV are belong to us!
Gan Family Homepage
The problem with settop boxes is that they decrease the usability of the TV. Assuming Chinese homes have one TV, that TV will can either be used to watch broadcast TV, pirated DVDs or surf the internet at 14.4. If you had your choice which would it be? If the family has 2 large TV's, then maybe they would be willing to tie one up with a substandard internet connection, but if you have two TVs that can display text (chinese characters no less) legibly then you can most likely afford an actual computer.* *This is all coming from someone who hasn't studied any Chinese post 195? history.
Long answer: TVs are terrible output devices (low rez, interlaced), and couches are terrible ergonomic environments for keyboarding/mousing.
You'd be better off building very cheap laptops like the Indians are doing.
It should be of no surprise that particular Microsoft "products" never leave the starting gate. Quite often, forthcoming products are announced years before their proposed arrival, probably even before the first lines of code are cast. The result is often that potential competitors may quash the development and release of their own future products, for fear that Microsoft's offering will be so much more successful. Another possible outcome is that an announcement can spark enough frenzied anticipation that Microsoft is convinced that a future product line is worthwhile. This is just a business practice, albeit a nasty one, that we see time and time again.
Cause if so, you're excused.
..you're a real idiot who can't use his brain. It's pretty clear that the submission's author's we refers to the chinese or world population in general.
.. you work for microsoft dont you??
Otherwise
How can people be so paranoid and suspicious of everything? Wait a second
Gosh, why don't people think a bit critically and analyze evidence carefully without immediate bias?
Who were the idiots that modded you up?
Moderators, PLEASE mod the parent post down, dont waste a mod pushing this one up.
browsing on a TV
is the future.
There is little or
no advantage to an
expensive PC, so
soon "WEB TV"
browsers will be
in the majority.
The cake is a pie
rotten resolution, if apple II didn't look good on the old Philco in the living room, why would dark-blue on blue web pages? I don't get this. sounds like somebody wrote down a dream on toilet paper when they got up, and it doesn't translate into reality.
Chinese text requires far more resolution than latin text. While you might get away with a 6x4 character grid for latin characters, very few chinese characters can be rendered at that resolution.
A set-top-box that does video chat over broadband and displays to a TV might work, but it seems unlikely that a useful amount of chinese text could be displayed on an ordinary TV.
In China we have a huge market with a very limited 'disposable income'. For Shanda to succeed, it's utility, real or marketing dept hyped, must make it a compelling enough purchase to beat out something else. That someting else, in Chine, will offer compelling utility. The trade-off is youth marketing. Culturally, the youth have a lot more clout in purchase decisions than in the WEST. Chinese youth, based on my observation, is so far removed from the adult cultutal ideals that Shanda may just have a cance. To succeed, it's got to tie in to the whole youth music, entertainment, social networking demand while avoiding the perception ofbeing a lame, stop-gap, solution. Can it do this? With the right apps and matketing, surely. Can Shanda pull this off? Yes, but only if they have a young, hip, and savvy, guy in charge of marketing and app development.
Show your hand if you think you've got the insight.
Microsoft's cost structures are too high, and they can't afford to provide anything "cheap" unless you also add "shoddy" as in the case of Windows XP Crippled Edition or whatever the name of the version they are selling in Asia is called.
Microsoft's idea of "cheap" is on the order of 10% less than their overpriced rates, if they even offer that much of a discount. So instead of $149 for a copy of an operating system they might consider charging $135, not like the $15 or less for which someone can buy a (fully functional) copy of Linux.
Microsoft has every right to charge all the traffic will bear, but let's not try to give a huge company the low cost and nimbleness of a small one. They can't do it, any more than an elephant can tiptoe.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
It's obvious that the parent is quite ignorant about China.
1. The power grid in China covers 96.4% of the Country.
2. The offical number of people in China is around 1.3 billion, but in reality it's probably 1.5 billion (calculated from their consumption of weat).
Perhaps you should visit China to see it first hand. No, I'm not Chinese or even Asian... but I've travelled the region, including China. They do have problems, but electricity is not high up on that list.
LCDR Data, when he was telling new-to-Picard's-Bridge Young Wesley:
;
"There once was a woman from Venus
Whose forehead was shaped like a..."
Riker and Picard knew where the joke was going, but Picard cut Data off at the pass...
Maybe there is an undisclosed reason the Venus never made it out the underground/windowless? lab? Apparently, they hid it where the sun don't shine...
"We? The article started as "Shanda did this", and then transitioned to "we did this"."
/. community.
This comment started as Quote and then transitioned to bullsht. "We" refers to whoever might be reading the article, such as the
Dolt.
...to having a Slashdot article about me.
Or will the words like "Democracy" continue to be blocked by the search engines?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Required reading for anyone tempted to post a comment on the IP law of China: Ministry of Science and Technology: Laws and Regulations
Topics:
Patent Law
Trademark Law
Copyright Law
Technology Contract Law
Product Quality Law
Freedom to buy alcohol and cigarettes without a license or age requirement
Shops ignore the law, but sales of alcohol and tobacco to minors is illegal in China and you are expected to show your ID. People's Daily Online: Law stresses ban on underage booze sales
Let's see, you have a research center with a history of producing pretty much exactly nothing useful. So how is it you are surprised when they keep the status quo and continue to do what they do best, which is write white papers and fail to release products?
Microsoft R&D is there to keep smart people out of other companies, if Microsoft wants any innovation they'll buy it wholesale if it looks like the market takes a shine to it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Excuse me but if you knew a bit more history you might see beyond your knee jerk anti-slashdot smugness. Many years ago a former Apple engineer started a company that promised to bring the web to standard TV users and the product was called WebTV. It was solidly engineered and designed. It made a big splash in the market and was acquired by Microsoft for quite a chunk of money.
I don't know why they emphasize some product that did not leave Microsoft's lab but WebTV sold in the millions and they got a lot of experience with that market. If the PC market had not seen the steady lowering of price there might have been a market for WebTV but as others have observed the limitations of NTSC (and SECAM and PAL) are unyielding. A company that makes a commitment to that doomed technology in China or elsewhere is taking on an absurd burden. Even the console market is migrating to HDTV with the next generation of products.
[Just for reference it would be more accurate to assume an NTSC set presents 320 x 240 pixels rather than 640 x 480 when trying to make comparisons with computer monitors.]
Isn't it lucky of them that Microsoft doesn't hold patents on that area.
if it wasn't so ugly.
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A few comments on the Shanda Box:
The "Box" will be one of the best low profile computers available. It's got a DVD drive, a hard drive, a mid-end ATI DirectX9 video card, and 802.11 wireless from Linksys. Just open up the box and upgrade the memory module, and you have a fairly powerful PC. The production versions will probably need some hardware hacks to make it a full PC, but the pre-production samples can be installed with any OS with no changes!
Shanda's big marketing theme for the Box is the Tivo function. There's no VCRs in China (went straight to VCD and DVD), so Shanda thinks that once people get hooked on recording, they can't live without it. This is probably a fantasy as the reason behind the lack of VCRs is also due to the lack of good content to record on the VCRs.
Shanda is going after the high end consumers with the Box. The box will cost anywhere from US$250 to US$600, depending on how much money Shanda wants to lose. Shanda's current market is heavily rural, so a large subscription base from the high end market will balance its earnings. LCD and Plasma TVs in China are selling extremely well right now, so there is definitely a large high end market in China. Why they will buy the Box instead of a Playstation 2 is another question.
Shanda's Box is meant as a home entertainment platform, not just a game console. Aside from games and Tivo, the Box is also meant to integrate other online services. Shanda plans to work with Ctrip (think Expedia) and Taobao (think eBay) on a lot of its content. Shanda also has an instant messaging service in the works. In addition, Shanda recently purchased a 19.5 stake in China's largest portal Sina.
Right now, I'm pretty pessimistic about the Box, because the entire business is a 'tweener. It's trying to be a game console, an e-commerce platform, an entertainment (mp3, streaming movie, regular TV) channel, and Tivo all in one. Maybe it'll get people hooked, but I think it's more likely that people will find the Box to be mediocre for all of those applications and rather purchase them seperately. i.e., a Playstation, a subscription to DTV, and a PC instead of one Shanda Box.
For more news on Shanda, see the following links:
Shanda To Cooperate With Stockstar, Taobao And Ctrip On IPTV: <url:http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/2904
Shanda's Chen Takes A Page From Apple : <url=http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/3174
Shanda To Launch IM Software : <url=http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/3055
Shanda Takes 19.5% Stake In Sina : <url=http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/2237
Shanda Licenses D&D From Turbine : <url=http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/2754
irrelevant because it is too unintelligent, spews annoying ads at us, uses a suck-ass business model where we, the audience, don't matter (just blandness between the largely unrelated-to-content ads) and shifting everything to the internet where everything is or will be searchable, on demand, inexpensive anarchy.
They are moulding their society into a passive receptacle for propaganda, or beer commercials. I wish them luck.
The natural order of things is entropy. Our model requires far less coherence that theirs, apart from a few protocols which must be adhered to.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I mean really. Considering the content on TV, how the fuck could/can you tell? Product placement?
The first tv virus was in the 1940s. It was intentional too.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
From the article:
It's strategy is to move Internet content to TV.
"Its".
Moderators: Please mod this post up to +5 informative, so that the editors and article poster can see it. Thank you.
This might not be a good time, if you're American:
Consider possible US allies that could line up against the US in a possible trade war:
Canada should have a trade war with America since we're sick and fscking tired of being screwed over every time American businesses see a new way of prospering at our expense.
Ever heard of softwood lumber? There have been or are ongoing disputes over veggies, cross-border pollution (Sumas Completion 2, etc.), etc ad nauseum.
Most annoyingly, when the WTO rules in Canada's favour, USA considers itself above WTO (when it's in their interest). America has never signed a trade treaty that it intended to abide by.
Europe's been pretty pissed at America over trade issues lately - steel dumping that isn't dumping, US gov't subsidizing US industries (Boeing, etc.), being found guilty, handing out subsidies with the *other* hand, claiming it now legal, losing again to Europeans, etc. ad nauseum.
Yes, a trade war would really help put USA in its place. Sign me up. I boycott USA almost as strenuously as I boycott Chinese made crap.
Here's something I totally agree with you on:
What China is proving today is that free market capitalism doesn't inherently lead toward freedom.
Couldn't have said it better myself.