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.

Comments

When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[psychodelicacy]

And this is the cool thing - it's a boy magnet! I get it out in the pub or Starbucks or wherever, and attract all those furtive glances that my looks alone sadly never procured for me. I even have some guy come up to me in the pub wanting to try out my Eee. So girls, forget the Apple that says "Hi - I like pretty things and ponies!" Get an Eee instead, and men will fall at your feet.

Well, okay geeks will fall at your feet, but in my case that's the required demographic...

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Just Some Guy]

I want one for this exact reason as well. Been too busy/lazy to really research it (and/or get my employer to buy me one).. how well does it function as a "portable thin client"?

Wonderfully. It comes with Firefox preconfigured with Flash and other plugins, Thunderbird, Kontact, OpenOffice, and lots of other useful apps.

Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?

Well, ctrl-alt-T gets you an xterm in the default install. You can reinstall if you want (and some people have been putting XP on them), but you might not want to.

In fact, at the risk of having my geek card revoked: I don't even go into advanced mode anymore. It boots more slowly than easy mode, and easy mode is good enough for me 99% of the time. I'm a huge KDE fan so I expected to hate the basic launcher and "need" the full KDE desktop, but all that extra flexibility kind of misses the point of the Eee PC.

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Neil Jansen]

I use mine daily and don't think the 800x480 is such a compromise. Once you implement some tricks to optimize your window manager and web browser, it's not bad at all. I run web apps like Google Docs, Mail, Calendar, Reader, etc.

I'm not exactly sure what a 'full blown' internet application is, but I've never ran into anything and been like 'damn, this is totally unusable'.

Mobile world

[blackbirdwork]

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.

Re:I think he's worried about nothing

[blackbirdwork]

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.

Customer

[EaglemanBSA]

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.

Re:Was that a blog, or an ad for Sony?

[electrosoccertux]

That's Sony for you: All marketing, no brains. I wouldn't say they have no brains. They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is. They chose to throw their engineering might behind Plasma TVs because, while they cost more, they produce a better picture (too bad the market preferred cheaper LCDs). They produced the first handheld 1080p camcorder, and it's actually high quality. Now anybody can make their own home-pro-snowboarding video. Their Vaio laptops are known, industry wide, for having, hands-down, the best displays-- AKA "X-Bright". They managed to create a great, cheap to produce for, entertainment system (PS1) and managed to duplicate that success with the PS2-- this thing has so many games I'm probably going to go buy one, even though PS3 has been out for [a while]. Now that Blu-Ray has won, I bet a lot of people will be picking up PS3s instead of other players when they get around to purchasing one.

All I'm saying is I see Sony as a superb tech producer with simply misguided management.

No, that is reporters for you

[SmallFurryCreature]

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!

Re:Was that a blog, or an ad for Sony?

[WindowlessView]

They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is.

I have no dog in the disk format wars but can Blu-ray's success really be chalked up to engineering? There are stories aplenty about how Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the movie studios to get them to switch. This seems more like marketing (or something more nefarious) than technical excellence and doesn't support your argument very well.

Re:Was that a blog, or an ad for Sony?

[Atlantis-Rising]

It seems very clear to me why Sony thinks a race to the bottom is bad. They argue that by forcing manufacturers, who already have thin margins to cut their margins even further by creating cheaper and cheaper commodity hardware, it will limit the likelihood of manufacturers investing in high-margin, high-value, cutting edge hardware- and will therefore limit the development of said hardware.

As a result, the focus on commodity PCs, like the eeePC, signals a shift away from the accelerating development of hardware and software toward a more stagnant approach.

I'm not sure I agree. But that's what it seems like Sony is arguing.