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?"
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.
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!"
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.
Yeah, well the problem is that we let our current account balance get way out of hand by running up enormous defense budget and tax cut debts (as well as SS and Medicare cost increases). We let credit cards rule the consumer so individuals aren't saving shit either. And it's possible that the tax code also encourages consumerism in big business. The end result is that China is buying up our debts and propping up the dollar. We can't afford to call their bluff now.
Asparagus has many and excellent powers.
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.
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.
Cheap in price, or cheap in quality?
--Mike Boos
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.
I'm taking you at face-value, whether or not you're serious.
I'm an American and I don't want the communists to get richer at our expense.
You talk about the free market, but you ignore our freedom to *not* buy their products. Are you an American, or are you selfish? If you're an American, and you're concerned about China getting rich off of us, then stop buying Chinese products. Or, you could selfishly give into the market, and buy whatever is cheapest.
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
IANAE, but I've had this same thought for about ten years. I don't understand the hypocrisy of our trade policy with China. We wouldn't even have to get into a trade war, honestly. It wouldn't come to that.
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.
Because Bush isn't stupid (for the record, I'm a member of the Green party) and has read his history. The same history that tells us that whenever America tries to ignore the rest of the world, it doesn't work. We end up getting into wars anyways.
We live in a global economy now. Nothing is cut-and-dry, there are no easy solutions to simple problems. I'd be willing to bet that if we really had a free market, you wouldn't like it very much, since your standard of living would significantly decrease. Significantly.
if and when the PLA invades Taiwan before 2008.
Please. There will be no invasion. It will be a peaceful coup. It will happen anytime China decides to make it happen. But it won't be an invasion.
I almost agree with everything you said. I don't agree with any of it.
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.
Okay, I've spent too much time arguing on Yahoo boards and have become rather imprecise. Yes, the US is a democratic republic. I've just gotten used to people saying "we're free and they aren't" etc. to justify their own supposed superiority. Knee jerk reaction. Sorry.
Personally, I think it's China who is taking the 'long view,' somthing that the Chinese are known for. They entice companies with short term profits, but the end result is that the Chinese will have their industrial technology. These companies going to China are either selling themselves out or investing in their competition.
Once these companies are knee deep in Chinese territory, China has an established history of selling them short.
In the Chinese view, this is the time when "sheep eat people." Just as various attempts to starve the southern states to feed the industrial north led to the American civil war, China is working to exploit their agricultural base in order to get cheap currency to buy foreign goods. In short, they're doing whatever they can to get industrial technology and the foreign currency that they need to buy advanced weapons.
Add to this the fact that China is massively corrupt, and it becomes clear why this huge influx of money isn't creating the basis for democracy.
Government (at the risk of sounding stuffy here) is pretty much a formalization of existing power relations. And China hasn't created a broad middle class. They're where we were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with Robber Barons, cheap labor, etc.
Also, I think some of this "globalization" trend is an effort by Western companies to counteract the power of unions and drive wages down. With industries in several labor pools, each working below capacity, any labor shortage in one pool can be made up for by switching to another.
Having been to China, I can say that there is certainly a market for high tech gadgets in the cities. The purchase of cars has soared. The roads can't take it. Internet bars are everywhere. There are more cell phones there than in the US. High tech stores run a brisk business. But you can't make software since there are no patents and so much readily available pirated software.
Don't believe any of this stuff about the Chinese switching to Linux. In sensitive govt. operations, maybe. But everywhere I went they were running pirated copies of windows.
Of course, I taught in Nanjing, which is in Jiangsu ( the wealthiest province in China) and the other provices are much different. Heck, even the rural areas of Nanjing are different. I guess what I'm trying to say is that 3rd world countries aren't typified by poverty as much as extreme disparity of wealth. There is a market for high end goods.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.