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Sony Says Eee PC Signals "Race To the Bottom"
Alex Dekker writes "Sony's Mike Abary says in an interview, 'If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.' Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. And he's not going to be too pleased when he sees the Linux-powered, sub-$200 Elonex One. Looks like what's bad for Sony may be good for the consumer." The CNet article mentions that a version of the Eee running XP is available in Japan now and will be coming to the US within weeks.
Remember when DELL said they'd create the first sub-$1000 PC and people just laughed at them? I never understand why people pay $2000 for a LAPTOP that can so easily be stolen, dropped or damaged. $200 for a email machine is more of the price range that they should be in.
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
The Asus is a badly done copy of my Vaio C1XD (My screen is 1024x480 pixels) - seven years old still going strong and great for getting on the internet when away from home (or out on the balcony).
realkiwi
Computing power has been a commodity for a long time now. Companies now have to differentiate and *gasp*! Compete! On product benefits beyond "Windows kind of works on it sometimes." Every industry reaches a plateau at some point, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, for businesses or consumers. Sony still makes decent ultra-portables that actually have some power, which the EEE won't compete with. Apple makes trendy machines with a great caché. It looks bad for the companies that put out crap laptops, like Dell, HP/Compaq and Gateway, but really- will anyone be sad to see them either make better machines or die?
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Seriously, did anyone read the whole thing? About two paragraphs are devoted to the whole 'race to the bottom' thing without explaining exactly why Sony thinks this a problem. The rest of the entry just goes on and on about all the cool things Sony sells and how many colors and textures the Vaio comes in.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
(MySpace|Facebook) + IM + Firefox doesn't need a $600 USD laptop though.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Your Dell comes with a 15.4" display, better resolution, better processor, more memory, bigger non-volatile storage, a normal keyboard, and maybe other things.
And weigh three times as much as the EeePC. There is a market for lower performance, light computers.
This is slashdot, so we need a car analogy. And indeed, people continue to buy expensive cars even though most people will buy a cheaper car that fulfills their needs instead of going for the top of the line. The influx of cheaper cars (from Japan, I may add!) didn't kill off the top models, although it relegated them to a niche market. /enough/ and affordable laptop computers, and Sony knows this fully well. They have chosen to stick with the upscale market, and shouldn't complain about EEE and similar eating their pie more than Porsche should complain about Nissan eating theirs.
Similar for laptops -- most people will buy what serves them well, and not splurge on the top models. There's a good market for small, fast
Regards,
--
*Art
Unfortunately, the x86 architecture and instruction set sucks.
I'm a happy owner of the following mobile devices:
- Asus Eee
- Nokia 770
- Nokia N810
I'd learnt something in these years: we don't need powerfull fat heavy devices, we need smaller and lighter devices, we don't care about power. For power we have fat big desktop computers.
That's the difference between the EeePC and an old laptop.
The EeePC is not supposed to be a super-powerful computer. Rather, the EeePC is supposed to be very portable, and affordable.
The big selling point for the EeePC in my case was the size. It's about the size of a paperback, and weighs the same. I can carry it around the office under my notepad to pull up a browser, email, or SSH session whenever I need it. It's replaced a much more powerful Dell and gave me more productivity.
Fixed that for you.
Did you use the Eee? It's the perfect device for a mobile world. Well, the internet tablets from Nokia would be the perfect devices but the qwerty keyboard of the Eee puts it in the first place. You can browse, play videos, music, chat, or do everything you need on that little screen. Sure, you won't feel comfortable using photoshop or any application that needs high resolution monitors, but that's not the target of the Eee.
Perhaps these companies (whether they be electronics manufacturers (Sony) or automotive manufacturers (GM), etc.) need to pull their heads out of their asses with respect to customer research.
LG did a bit of customer research, painted their washers and dryers red, and quadrupled sales overnight. Toyota made a tiny, efficient car (echo), and sales boomed. Asus made a PC that it figured would sell really well, and they were right, as a result of understanding their customers' CTQ's.
I love my eeepc because it's exactly what I need. Portable, durable, cheap and linux-based. Sony, Dell and the rest can produce what they want, but when it doesn't sell, it's nobody's fault but their own.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
And your hard drive will crash if you hit hard your Dell, the SSD of the Eee will not break. (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dhhl_tests-resistance-chocs-chaleur-froi_tech)
The influx of cheaper cars (from Japan, I may add!) didn't kill off the top models...
Not yet but American auto manufacturers are on life support. GM used to be huge. Remember the old saying that what's good for GM is good for the country? Probably before your time. As big as GM was in the day and as small as those upstart Japanese car makers were in comparison, there's been quite a turn around. That in an industry that evolves at a glacial pace.
The technology market evolves much faster. The technologies that should scare the bejabbers out of the status quo include:
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Its fairly cheap, sure, but as you point out its not the best value for money on that score.
It is because it is also small, and light, at under one kilogram and smaller and a A4 pad it easily slips into a satchel, or messenger style bag that many people carry around these days, making it much more practical to keep with you than a traditional large heavy laptop.
You can of course buy small sleek laptops with more features, but they tend to cost more, a LOT more.
Its the balance point of price and size and features that makes it so popular, alter any one of those very far and you lose that unique selling point.
But they cost 10x as much and, despite Sony marketing assurances, alligator skin is not what people want a laptop to do. EEE delivers almost everything people care about in a laptop for an order of magnitude less than the competition. The reason it's selling for twice as much as expected is because it's a runaway hit and considered a good deal at $400. Used computers of the same weight sell for twice the price but offer only better screen size and keyboard. If they come with Windows, a used laptop does not offer much performance gain, and some significant performance losses, as well as a the usual Windows migration and software install pains. Good for Asus, EEE sells out as soon as they hit the shelves because people who don't care about GNU/Linux want it.
The entire article is nothing more then the an out of context quote. Cnet heard something they think might sound nicely controversial, plunks it in in an article that seemingly has no goal and watches the ad revenue stream in when as predicted slashdot picks it up, makes an entire story out of one quote and runs rampant with it.
Personally I think this is all overblown, offcourse Sony who operates at the high end for laptops will call a move for the cheapest laptop a race to the bottom and warn that if this catches on "better watch out", but you note that completly absent from this article is any condemnation of this, neither do they warn consumers about the Eee. He might as well be meaning that those companies who think they can only sell super expensive ones better watch out.
Oh wait, I am doing it wrong ain't I. Sony is the evil!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is mostly because of the US economy grinding to a halt. I'm pretty sure that it still costs the same in euros/yuan/whatever other currency was initially projected.
c++;
If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well [...]
What do you mean, "if"?
-- Cerebus
This kind of thing is why Windows will never be ready for the micro-laptop.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What's wrong with a race to the bottom? Like any other competitive market, it will force companies to innovate to try to provide faster performance at lower prices, driving innovation in the lower end of the market. I, for one, am quite excited.
Personally, I doubt many people buy one of these things as their only device. I don't think it's intended to be your main machine. It may not even be intended to be your only laptop.
From a market positioning standpoint, this is the most intriguing mobile computing device to come out since the original Palm. At $300, it's priced just at the "what the hell" point where you might make an impulse buy. It is not promising to solve all your problems, nor is it priced as if it did. The value proposition is for a small amount of dough you get something that is new and interesting, and makes your life a bit more convenient. The choice not to use Windows is particularly interesting, and not only because it attracts early adopters. A device like this has to feel novel.
Of course, the fact that this device doesn't replace your laptop doesn't mean the trend towards lugging around a desktop replacement is going to continue indefinitely. Once people's data and applications are freed from their hard drive, all they really need are access terminals with various form factors.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh, good, another cycle begins.
I remember being fascinated by stories of how IBM's top management was afraid of microprocessors, because they sensed from the very beginning how they were a disruptive threat to mainframes. For a while they tried to keep them under control by limiting them to specialized appliances such as word processors and the DataMaster. As I recall, the original IBM PC team was ordered to use the 8088 because they wanted to reserve the 8086 for their high-margin $10,000-and-up devices.
This is all very reminiscent of the disk drive manufacturer story in Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." It's time for a $100 laptop, but they won't come from the companies making $1000 laptops. They'll come from elsewhere, e.g. the XO, and the mainstream will scorn them as underpowered toys, and they'll find a market among people who want underpowered toys, and as time goes on they'll get more and more powerful and start eating the $1000 laptop-makers' lunch.
Then someone will introduce a $10 laptop and the cycle will repeat...
I'm not joking about a $10 laptop. Calculators went from $4000 desktops to $300 palmtops to $5 calculators in blister packs at grocery stores (and free advertising giveaways). And it was a different set of manufacturers at each level. Electromechanical rotary calculators: Marchant and Monroe, IIRC. Electronic desktops: Monroe trying and dropping out, Wang and HP leading. Palmtops: Wang drops out without even trying, HP makes an elegant transition, TI jumps in. Cheap four-function palmtops: HP and TI are out, I'm not even sure who makes them now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There is no "they" there. There are many divisions to Sony, and many products. Granted, some suck, and badly. And yes, they have predatory pricing (see below). Sometimes, however, they deliver.
Consider the PD-150. This video camera is legendary, for good reason (and its even better follow-up, the PD-170). They produce great SD video, they're small, sturdy, somewhat expandable, and reliable as hell. Very tough. Controls are in a good location, other design features are balanced, etc. This is the camera that guerilla documentarians had to have, for many years. They're still in heavy use, years after being discontinued.
The other side of that is predatory. I once lost the remote control to a video deck, that had controls on it not available on the deck face controls, basic stuff like displaying timecode. Now other than a few specialized buttons, there is nothing special about this remote, it's a little black bar with infrared. Sony Canada wanted $500 freakin' dollars for a replacement... for a $15 dollar part, at best. Classic nasty company policy. Of course I bought a fully functional third party item for 1/6th the price. Video pros have a serious love-hate thing going with Sony.
Damn those pesky terrorists