Two Slashes

Before I begin, I just wanted to thank everyone involved in my sudden spike in traffic over the past few days as the result of that “pci32b.exe” article; it’s still up for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s responsible for tripling my 24-hour unique visit numbers.  Go figure.

Thanks to (as usual) my habitual Digg surfing, I came across a rant describing why Asus, the PC manufacturer (also known as ASUSTEK) is the most hated company in all of the PC industry.

Before I even get started with what I really want to say, I just want to play devil’s advocate for a second and point out that the EEE PC did probably just make an impact in the way future devices are going to be developed?  And hey, I’m game for a laptop with no moving parts.

Anyway, I find it interesting that someone could call such an out-of-the-way company the “most hated” corporation in the entire computing industry.  For sure, there are plenty of more worthy candidates (did I hear “Microsoft”?), and at the least more popular and well-known ones.  How can you claim the public hates a company that has very little brand recognition; if I walk up to any typical consumer and ask them to name me all the brands of PC they can think of, I guarantee that among them small brands like Asus and Falcon Northwest are not going to be on that list.  The list they give me might list Apple, HP/Compaq, Dell, and perhaps Gateway or Alienware (you’d be surprised how many know about Alienware but not FN or other “gaming-specialty” companies, but I digress).  In short, you can’t claim a company is hated simply because it changes the way things are developed.

Okay, so Asus got to market with something before several other manufacturers did.  But let’s time travel back to when the iPod was introduced.  The audio player was a new market back then too, no?  And Apple came out, showed off a device with a scroll wheel and the “Apple-intuitive” interface (*cough*Creative*cough*) , and after that every media player to follow had to be based on a menu system.  It’s just another drop in the bucket, and there’s plenty of time to change things.

Sure, iPod may still be around and going strong, but it also has the name recognition behind it to carry it in the first place; Asus, on the other hand, has a strong but belittled following of people, and without the proper advertisement and word-of-mouth, they’re going to stay that way - paving the road for bigger behemoths like Dell and Apple to do as they want with the market.  I’d like to slightly sidestep here for a moment to point out that when the EEE first started shipping from sites like Newegg, it wasn’t CNN broadcasting news about the people who got too many in their shipment; it was aggregated along the usual “geek” channels like Digg and Slashdot from originators like Engadget and Gizmodo - never once did I see a mention of it on “mainstream” news.

In truth, Apple isn’t all that concerned because they’ll do what they do, and the masses will respond. But poor Dell. That company’s flash-based mini-laptop will probably cost five times as much as the ASUS. It will be 10% better and 500% more expensive than the ASUS Eee PC. Good luck with that, Dell!

This excerpt in particular irks me, because it’s inaccurate.  As of late, I’ve thought Dell to be a very affordable solution, at least for the lower-to-mid-range systems.  As long as they can continue in this path, the Dell offering would be very affordable indeed, not to mention the support offerings would far outstrip those of the foreign “invader”(’invader’ is too strong a word here, but it’s close to what I mean).  Sure, you can go to Walmart and pick up one of those extremely cheap offbrand PCs they have, but they’re from a brand that (again) has no consumer recognition and that is going to be picked up by someone with a bit of know-how that realizes parts are parts are parts.

Not to mention, there’s the reverse side of the coin here too:  Yes, Asus was first-to-market.  Yes, Asus is also currently the only person offering such a slim laptop on the market.  Yes, they have a device that has geeks who know about it twitching and itching to get their hands on one.  No, the average consumer doesn’t know about it.  And that’s good, in a way.  Not only can Apple, or Dell, or any of those other companies put something out, but they can spin their advertisements to point out some random flaw in the Asus design…it wouldn’t matter what it was; it could be something as trivial as the location of a USB port.  But by pointing out the mistake, they make themselves look like the better machine…and what do people do in that scenario?  Look at the two, and pick the one that works better, not only in this case because the (potentially) “invisible” problem is missing in the name-brand version, but because it’s name-brand.

So all I’ve done to this point is rebuke the “most hated” part of the article in question.  Asus is indeed not the most hated in the industry.  Some clarification would qualify the headline (i.e. “Most Hated by Computer Industry Corporations”), but it doesn’t work as it’s written.

And this is going to sound like a flipover from everything else I just said, but I do believe that Asus is underestimated.  Their machines (at least, what experience I’ve had with them) are functional, and by slipping into a new market niche ahead of everyone else, they’ve lined themselves up to be the brainchild behind the R&D in this new category of devices.  It doesn’t take a million PCs sold to make a statement about what features people want; in a way, Asus is better-suited to handle this because of their smaller size - they make the development jump adding new features, and the bigger corporations tack it into their later models in a monkey-see, monkey-do approach.  It’s win-win, and it’s competitive marketing.

And by the way, I’ll just admit it…I was rather waiting to get my hands on a Foleo.