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'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.
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.