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The Eee PC has lost its magic
The Asus Eee PC 901 and beyond will disappear without trace within a year (New Asus models set for UK release, 13 June). Once again, the tech-heads and the marketing men have got hold of a great idea and ruined it.
Why was the Asus Eee PC 700 such an enormous success? Mainly because of the price - but it was also a useful, simple solid-state portable PC with good battery life and a free OS. It has a spec that could have been written by a user, by someone who actually uses a portable on batteries.
What it had was needed, not a perception of what everyone wanted. Things it doesn't need include: fast processor, fast internet, advanced media player, huge hard drive, masses of ports, a high price tag and XP, Vista or OSX. In short, all the things the 901 has got. Keep it cheap, simple and keep increasing the battery life.
Toshiba, Olivetti, Psion, IBM, Sony and many other vendors have been making - and have stopped making - machines of this size for years and years. What the 700 model had was a useful colour word processor with email and web access, which is what 90 per cent of users actually use. Once you have to plug a portable in it's worthless.
If Asus dropped the price of the Eee PC 700 its sales would take off again.
Unfortunately, the 700 will be dropped to make way for another £300-plus toy.
PBG
It's so sad to see a Major Innovator in the market become just another part of it. Asustek was one of the fastest rising companies and got the attention if not the ire of the major players when they introduced the Eee PC 700 series. They had opened up a new sector in the computer sales market and it was one not thought of possible . . . cheap, reliable, simple laptops for ordinary users who about outnumber tech-heads and heavy users about 100 to 1 ( very conservative figure ) a huge portion of the market long disregarded by the major players and could well possibly topple them from their perch had ASUS not changed the formula that made them innovators. It is also noteworthy that they did this not with any new technology or discovery but with existing tech overlooked by the other players for a huge part of the market never seen by the them too. It is so sad because it was not only Asus that was gaining, benefitting, and improving, the ordinary user market also was.
Posted by :Jngoi | July 7, 2008 4:14 AM