Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I believe that "we" is meant to be a collective; i.e., "we", as the world of 2005, now have faster hardware, more Internet content and users.
The submitter is a Chinese PhD student blogger, legitimately trying to source for more opinions from Slashdot about this issue.
If you had read his blog linked from his submission, you'll see he has done some of his own analysis. Quite a bit more than what most posters here have so far, and it's not very much yet.
Gan Family Homepage
Also, you have to keep in mind that a Chinese characters are entire words. So while a symbol might have to be four times the size to be readable, it also will be one symbol for what could be five or six symbols in English.