Asus made small but powerful laptop with great ratio of price and value. Although initially for developing countries, the rich market recognized great concept and execution
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Back in 1989 four Acer employees left their company and started another four-letters company named Asustek, or just Asus. Jonney Shih lead the company since 1994 and manager to position Asustek as the largest manufacturer of motherboards and one of the Top 10 laptop makers. As many companies of its kind Asustek started slowly, wanted to get rid of the attribute "copycat". In 1997 they designed their first laptop and their path was successful - last year they sold more the four millions laptops in all world markets.
Mr. Shih was very aware of the first billion; a term that denotes the mature market and number of people that has a personal computer. It is obvious that the next billion is "hiding" in the developing world. It is also obvious that people in those countries cannot afford to pay 2000 dollars for a laptop, so Mr. Shih decided to make a small, powerful, yet cheap mobile computer. As we are all aware of, smaller laptop means bigger price. We know that and industry knows that but Asus' leader didn't want to accept that fact.
Nicholas Negroponte already started One Laptop Per Child project and Intel was working on Classmate PC, but the prevailing opinion was that small and simple laptop is more toy than a computer. Mr. Shih called Jerry Shen and they started to solve all range of problems, from technical specifications to price negotiations. For the chipset and graphics they turned to Intel, for OS they used Linux and talked to Microsoft, and for memory... they do it themselves.
Mrs Shih and Shen had just one month to show the prototype to people from Intel. However, they managed to do that and (I hate this phrase, but it is true in this case) rest is history.
So, what's inside Asus Eee? First, it weights only 0.92 kg which means it is a perfect companion for business people who already has too much stuff to carry to business travel. It is much more convenient that three time heavier 17-inch laptop. It has solid-state disk of 4 GB and that is good because such disks demand less energy and there's no fear if you hit the wall with it. (Not that I recommend that, but there are no moving parts like in traditional hard disks).
Eee has 512 MB of DDR2 memory and that can be expanded to one gigabyte and that's plenty of space for business and entertainment applications. Screen id 7-inch color, battery will hold for three hours, and if you want to be connected with the world there's Ethernet and WiFi 802.11 b/g that automatically detects hotspot and connects to the Internet. Operating system is Linux with all the necessary software, or you can choose Windows if you prefer. Asus Eee has built-in camera, microphone, speakers and card reader.
Thus having said, what is the market reaction? Shortly - it's fantastic. The first 200 Eees sold out in Taiwan in just 20 minutes. Yahoo! started to sell Eee at 17:00 and sold first 50 Eee PCs in three minutes. 3C Company needed just 30 minutes to sell first 100 pieces, and PC Home Online sold 200 just like that.
After great debut in Taiwan, Asus Eee comes to USA and Europe and having in mind that 100,000 pieces has already shipped, and 400,000 will to the end of the year, there's no doubt that Eee will conquer markets in developed countries. Some data shows that travellers and business people are among those who recognized the values of little Asus. We'll end this article with simple advice: Go and see. The chances are you will buy it. ■
