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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."
January 24, 2008 9:49 AM PST
Eee PC with Windows launches in Japan, U.S. is next
Posted by Erica Ogg | Post a comment
Asus launched the first Windows version of its popular Eee PC in Japan on Thursday, according to a report in The Register.
Called the Eee PC 4G-X, it will come pre-loaded with Windows XP Home Edition. It has the same specs as the original 4G model with Linux introduced last fall: 4GB of storage, Intel Celeron processor, 512MB of RAM, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, and more.
Eee PC
The U.S. version of the Eee PC, pictured above, uses a Linux-based operating system. Next month we'll see the Windows XP version.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)
The Japanese launch is good news for potential U.S. buyers of the computer, a cross between an oversized Internet tablet and a notebook, because it means the U.S. version is coming very soon.
Asus originally promised we'd have the Windows version of the tiny Asus Eee PC in December. The Taiwan-based company now says we can expect it in late February or early March. Though the original date came and went, it certainly hasn't stopped customers from ordering the Linux-based version: the company reportedly moved 350,000 units in the first quarter it was available.
The EeePC was promised to be around $200.00 and it currently sells for $299.00 most places $399 for the decked out version. nearly TWICE the promised price. all the others come in way WAY over as well.
Why buy a Eee PC when I can get a Dell cheapie of the moment with 12X the power at the same or LESS price. Last one I got was $369.99 on one of their 1 day sales. I can do way more than the eeepc and saved money.
I'm for the race for the bottom if the race is sanely priced. right now it's not.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Are consumers actually getting to the point where they buy what they need rather than the high end, of what they want?
Imagine if this were to happen to the automotive industry...
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
First of all, all these little laptops are really cute, but for anything that's not listening to mp3's, looking at pictures, and surfing the internet you are in trouble. Now I realize that this is what the vast majority of computers are used for, but people overbuy what they need because of what they MIGHT do. People buy trucks bigger than what they need so they can occasionally tow a boat - you also buy computers more powerful than what you need because you MIGHT want to want decent quality video clips. You might want to do some video and audio editing, you MIGHT want to keep more than 8-16gb's worth of data on your computer, and you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux. I don't know about you, but surfing the internet on a 8" screen with a 800 x 480 resolution screen sounds like a nightmare, especially if you are used to even an SXGA. I personally think these are cute little gimmicks, but only time will tell for sure.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Funny you say that in a thread about an Intel powered laptop.
By the way, OS/2 is officially dead.
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
OK, quick show of hands of those who feel sorry for Sony. One guy wayyy in the back. You can put your hand down, sir. Thanks.
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.
than just this one product.
1. Take a look at this estimate of who builds laptops for what brand. http://tuxmobil.org/laptop_oem.html The brands like Sony might change vendors, but the manufacturers listed haven't changed, so re-arrange the check marks if you want to pretend.
2. Many of the OEM's are marketing barebones laptops which are going to eat into Sony's laptop business in unpleasant ways. MSI and Asus are two notables. http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=23
Talk amongst yourselves....
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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?
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
Seeing as your Vaio cost over $2000 brand new (with 64MB of RAM), and this is $300 (with 512MB), I'd say they're allowed to do a few things badly.
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.
People are easily dazzled and convinced to buy things they don't need.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Hmm. It seems to me that rootkitting your customer's computers is more like the REAL race to the bottom.
Seeing as his Vaio was purchased seven years ago, I'd say it's not really a fair comparison.
I bought one a month or two ago to take with me to classes. I was replacing a heavy-ass Toshiba Satellite, with a 15" screen. That thing was nice, 2-3 years ago, but the damn thing was too heavy to carry around everywhere.
Enter the eeePC, which comes fairly cheap (mine was 399.99) with Linux pre-installed. It's Xanadros, and I'll admit, I'm a moron, so I didn't want to deal with it. Installing XP was anything but easy... lacking a DVD-rom drive, I had to port it to a memory stick, run a bunch of suspicious looking programs to make the stick bootable, and then run it from there. XP died after installing 4-5 times, 6th time's the charm...
Anyways, with XP on it, it runs like a champ. All the drivers work out of the box. I think the eeePC is mostly made of commodity hardware too, making it a delicious geek toy. People have put touchscreens on it, soldered more stuff in the mobo, etc.
Mine's pretty basic, I slapped in an extra 2gb of SD memory and 2 gb of ram, and then overclocked the processor to 900 mhz. Runs wonderfully. The little bastard can even run Second Life.
I lurve my eeePC. I use it as a replacement for my pen-and-paper notepad.
hookers and grits.
If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well [...]
What do you mean, "if"?
-- Cerebus
For the sites that do give you trouble at 800x(600|480), there's several things you can do.
1) Run Firefox in full-screen mode
2) Write a greasemonkey script for the particular site
3) Use Compiz's Shelf plugin and resize Firefox to 1024x768 (I need to figure out how to automate this with a script), then scale it down to 800x480. Composite window managers rock.
4) If you need to get some real work done, you can always connect a desktop LCD to it temporarily and do your work at 1280x1024.
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.
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!
I had the unique experience to go to Japan two years ago as part of an NSF funded research project. When I got there, I was shocked to find that my 15.4" laptop was the biggest in the room. Out of 30 or so people, about a third had Apples, and the other two-thirds had Windows machines, but they were small.
It wasn't unusual to see the participants carrying their laptops through the halls with the display open, holding it one-handed by a corner, and continuing to type as they went.
While American laptops tend to be "full fat" beasts (see the 17" one at ZaReason.com, or the 21" mammoth at Dell), the Japanese have embraced smaller, more portable laptops (like the Kojinsha).
Of course, the Japanese machines weren't as underpowered as the Eee PC is, but I think the Eee PC is a very good first step in getting Americans to let go of their bigger-is-better attitude when it comes to laptops.
One last comment - my 15.4" laptop is too big to open when I fly coach. The front to back distance is such that it ends up jabbing me in the stomach. My next machine will definitely be 13" or less, no matter what.
"We are making butt loads of money on PCs right now, and I'd hate to see that come to an end."
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
The CTO of one of the companies I used to work for had a sign on his wall: