With apologies for lateness – travel and problematic internet connections are to blame – here is my column from the FT on Thursday:
What is the most influential piece of personal technology of the past two years?Amazon’s Kindle? Apple’s iPhone? Research in Motion’s BlackBerry? All of these North American devices are worthy but my prize goes to the Asus Eee PC made by Asustek of Taiwan.
“A lot of people scoffed at them and I must admit I was an early disbeliever,” says Bob O’Donnell of IDC, the research group, about Asustek, which in October 2007 came up with its small, light, cheap laptop computer known (misleadingly, it turns out) as a netbook.
Few analysts grasped the significance of the Eee because they did not think that people in the developed world would buy a not-very-powerful device with a tiny screen and a small keyboard. Meanwhile, US companies from Dell to Microsoftand Apple gazed studiously elsewhere.
Yet, nearly two years on, evidence of the Eee’s influence is everywhere, from the weak outlook reported by Dell this week to Google’s announcement that it will build a rival to Windows in its Chrome OS operating system, and Microsoft’s move to offer a free web version of its Office software suite.
The Asus Eee, and rival netbooks made by Acer, another Taiwan company, have converted consumers and caused havoc in the personal computer industry, reducing revenues and margins at both software and hardware companies. Everyone except Apple has ended up following Asustek.
This, however, leaves a question. If the netbook, now defined as a mini-notebook with a screen of up to 10 inches, costing between $300 and $600, weighing two or three pounds and usually running on Intel’s Atom chip, is so appealing, why did it take so long to arrive?
You can read the rest of the column here and comment below.
