Alex Kidman04 June 2008, 2:30 PM
Bluescreen | ASUS has decided to capitalise on the runaway success of the Eee PC and focus the company name on it. Oddly, though, its Eee desktop PC will be called the Wii PC.
Bluescreen: Alex Kidman satirises the burgeoning PC industry, crashing kernels along the way.
Bluescreen has learned in advance of the Computex trade fair that manufacturer Asus intends to relaunch the entire company around its most successful product to date: The Eee PC. Early reports elsewhere had showed prototypes of the eBox, an Eee PC desktop derivative, but according to Bluescreen's sources, this is just the beginning of Asus' rebranding plans.
"Look, we make motherboards, graphics cards, optical drives, PDAs, notebook computers, servers, networking products, mobile phones, computer cases, computer components and computer cooling systems! But nobody remembers that! They just want systems with fruit on them, or with the name of some Texas hick emblazoned on the back!" our exasperated Taiwanese mole within AsusTek told us.
"The Eee PC, though -- that was different. We'd done everything else wacky we could think of up until then: Pink notebooks. Leather bound notebooks. Small children dancing suspiciously at product launches*. Motherboards that would intermittently spit out acid onto your graphics cards if it wasn't one of ours... actually, don't quote me on that one, please.""Anyway, we hit the big time with the Eee. Everyone wanted one, and suddenly we were inundated with orders from all of our OEM partners to rip the Eee logos off and rebrand them. Of course, we had to point out that we split our business into three parts back in January, and they'd have to talk to the boys at Pegatron**. Strangely, our American partners all started shouting "OMG Decepticons! Must protect Optimus Prime!" before hanging up on us, which is why we haven't made an Eee derivative for anyone else yet.""In the meantime, we've got the factory guys replacing all of the initial A's on our logos for Eees. And we're looking strongly at further miniaturising our existing Eee line".That last comment was apparently in reaction to the news that
Dell had plans to move into the Netbook market with a Mini-Inspiron model, and Acer has a similar UMPC on the books. Acer, in any case, refused to comment on the grounds that Asus was formed by ex-employees*** HP already has the Mini-Note 2133 on the market, and when Bluescreen checked with other vendors, we received a number of different replies:
Apple, of course, said nothing, but there were fifty rumours immediately available, showing that the Mac community is nothing if not creative. Sony officially said nothing, but we were led to understand that the company cannot think of a product selling for less than $500 with a Sony badge on it; the badge is apparently worth at least that much in Sony's eyes. Toshiba representatives were similarly mum; we understand that unofficially the technicians are having trouble making their Eee PC derivative playback the unsold mountain of HD-DVDs the company has lying around.
In any case, Eeesus doesn't plan to sit still in the netbook space, despite having launched the 900 a mere couple of months after the 700, and having a replacement Atom-powered Eee ready to make the 900 early adopters feel like schmucks for being early adopters "
in a week or so." The next step? Even smaller and smaller systems, according to our source:
"The customers have shown they'll put up with a keyboard that induces terminal RSI in a matter of seconds, so we're miniaturising it as fast as possible. At the same time, with the 900 series, we showed that we could charge more for what was internally much the same thing, all the while getting a tasty kickback from a certain operating system vendor. So the new micro-mini netbooks won't just be smaller -- they'll also cost more, to boot. And they'll be running Vista Ultimate, leaving 3K free onboard for user storage."Bluescreen understands that Eesus intends to further follow up the micro-Eee with a Mini-Micro-Eee within the next three months.
"The mini-Micro Eee not only keeps us ahead of our competitors, but also opens up a rich new revenue stream for us. Tiny, tiny notebooks are really easy to lose, and we anticipate that new Eee users will lose approximately 5 Mini-Micro Eees in the first year."* Sometimes, the truth is funnier than you might think...
** This is genuinely what Asus' OEM arm is called.
*** You can learn all sorts of interesting things online. This wasn't one of them.