Netbook Effect: Why Small and Cheap Laptops Gain Popularity
Mary Lou Jepsen did not intend to invent a netbook and rotate the industry 180 degrees. She was just trying to create an incredibly cheap laptop. In 2005, when Jepsen developed LCD displays, she was appointed to lead the development of a computer, which later became known as the One Laptop per Child . Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of MIT Media Lab for a long time, launched the project in the hope of creating an inexpensive computer for children living in developing countries. The computer had to have Wi-Fi, a color display and a full-sized keyboard, and at the same time cost about $ 100. At this price, the governments of the Third World countries could afford to buy them and distribute them free of charge in village villages. Well, everything else, these computers had to be small, very strong and run at minimum power. Jepsen emphasizes that "half the children in the world do not have permanent access to electricity."
These cost constraints forced her to become damn inventive. She abandoned rotating hard drives in favor of flash memory — the one used in USB flash drives — because she consumes very little power and does not “die” when dropped. As software she chose Linux and other free, open packages, rather than paid software from Microsoft. She used an AMD Geode processor , which was not too fast, but consumed less than one watt of power. But the main charm was that Jepsen developed the original LCD display, which determines when the image is static (for example, when you read a document) and “orders” the processor to shut down in order to save precious electric power.
For the production of this laptop, called XO-1, the project One Laptop per Child hired a Taiwanese company Quanta . This is an unfamiliar company, however, Quanta is the largest laptop maker in the world. Probably, it is strange, but the details of the computer that is on your desk, whether it is Apple, Dell or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta, and, perhaps, even developed by her. Like many Taiwanese computer makers, Quanta has some of the coolest engineers on the planet. They solved many of the most complex engineering challenges posed by Mary Lou Jepsen, and by 2007 OLPC was ready. Poor children can get their own laptop, if not for $ 100, then for a bit more expensive.
Inspired (and perhaps a little scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek , a longtime competitor to Quanta in Taiwan and the 7th largest notebook maker in the world, began making its own cheap, low-end computer. It also had to be cheap due to the use of flash memory, a thin 7-inch screen and Linux OS. It lacked a DVD drive and it was not able to run programs like Photoshop. However, Asustek has labeled this laptop mainly as a machine for checking email and web surfing. As users of Asustek, its users were supposed to be children, retirees, and a developing middle class in India or China who cannot afford a $ 1,000 laptop.
')
But everything turned out completely different. When Asustek released its Eee PC in the fall of 2007, as many as 350 thousand of these netbooks diverged in a few months. Eee PCs were not bought in poor countries, but they were liked by people from the middle class in Western Europe and the USA who wanted a second laptop that fits in a small bag so that you can climb on YouTube or Facebook at any time. Soon other manufacturers of PCs - Dell, HP, Lenovo; almost every American computer maker has thrown a tiny netbook into the market under the "up to $ 400" category.
If you think about it, all this is extremely strange. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware manufacturing business. Usually, production moves down from the high end to the mass market. Computer manufacturers initially target products with new and cool features. And only years later, those innovations come in models of the low-end class.
But the development of Jepsen, on the contrary, moved up the path. In the process of creating a laptop to meet the needs of the poor, she discovered an amazing thing for ordinary PC users. They don't want more from a laptop - give them less.
Many netbooks change fast embedded processors and capacious hard drives of full-sized laptops for online applications and small, but fast, solid-state drives. And what is the result? Cool car for a third price.
By the end of 2008, Asustek sold 5 million netbooks, and another 10 million sold the rest of the brands (Europe generally bought abrupt netbooks; sales there were eight times higher than in the US). In one year, netbooks captured 7 percent of the global laptop market. Next year, this figure will rise to 12 percent .
“We began to push technology to the bottom of the pyramid,” says Jepsen, “but the top of the pyramid also needs it.” This part of the upward innovation — this netbook — can fundamentally change the computer industry — if it doesn't kill it first.
I wrote this material on a netbook, and if you looked through my shoulder, you would see only two icons on my desktop: Firefox and Recycle Bin. And that's all.
It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do at the computer can now be done through the browser. I use it for communication on Twitter and Facebook, as well as for blogging. Meebo.com allows me to simultaneously use several online pagers. Last.fm lets you listen to music, and webmail replaces a regular email client. Instead of a word processor, I use Google Docs, and if I need to record a video, I can do it directly from my webcam to YouTube. If you think about the fact that the documents are not on the netbook, I'm not sure that I even have to delete them.
Netbooks have stopped performance wars. They existed when you came to the electronics store for the sake of buying a computer, choosing the most powerful one you could imagine. Why? Who knew? Maybe one day you would have to play a modern video game or edit the best indie snapshot. For 15 years, the computer industry has threatened us with paranoia “what if?”, Imparting performance. Intel and AMD threw out fast chips, hard drives caught up with a terabyte gallop, the RAM was torn, and high-end video cards allowed you to play Blu-ray movies on your clumsy 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.
But here's the catch: most of the time we do nothing. Our most common tasks — mail, web surfing, streaming video — require very little processing power. Only some people, like graphic designers or gamers, really need a powerful hardware. For many years, the personal computer industry was similar to car factories producing SUVs: they stupidly advanced powerful cars because profit margins were high while customers enjoyed fantasies as they drove off-road; only on the roads they ride and did not have to. Similarly, programmers abused excess capacity for writing very cumbersome applications and operating systems.
What really managed to make the creators of netbooks, so it is to turn the clock back: their machines work at the level of laptops four years ago. And it turns out that those capacities are more or less enough. "Ordinary computers are so fast that you can hardly find any differences between 1.6 and 2.2 GHz," said Andy Tung, vice president of MSI (Taiwan netbook maker Wind) for US sales. "We can find the difference between one and a couple of seconds, but not between one and two ten thousandths." The factor of the brakes of most of the current tasks assigned to the computer is not iron - these are other problems. They are outside. Is the Wi-Fi signal level normal? Once again fell Twitter?
Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for . That is, there is a small list of things that can be done online. It felt Asustek. The company received a laptop with a price of less than $ 300, creating a device that is absolutely useless without the Network. Think of it: the original Eee flash memory was only 4GB. It is so small that you have to store your images, videos and other files on the Web, setting the minimum amount of software on the netbook itself - simply because of the lack of disk space.
Netbooks prove that distributed computing is no longer an empty sound. Now it makes sense to develop computers for which resource-intensive tasks are performed "on the side". The tail of distributed computing is wagging a computer hardware dog.
Most consumers have never heard of Taiwanese little-known personal computer makers, but they have stood behind some of the most important hardware of the past thirty years. Quanta, in the eighties, for the first time realized the beauty of supplying new components to laptops. Then, in 2001, Apple placed an order with the company for the complete development of the G4 laptop. This laptop was an incredible success, and Quanta soon began to develop for other major manufacturers of personal computers. Asustek and MSI - two other huge Taiwanese laptop makers - have also moved from manufacturing motherboards alone to building technology from mobile phones to LCD panels. These companies were huge: sales of Quanta last year amounted to $ 25 billion - more than companies like Amazon.com, Texas Instruments and Electronic Arts.
Even despite the fact that Taiwanese manufacturers have remained subordinate to well-known computer brands, they receive a lot of knowledge over the years. For example, when Intel created its x486 chip in 1988, Asustek made its compatible motherboard before the release of the original from Intel itself. Later, Asustek produced components for laptops from Apple. “Nine times out of ten,” recalls former Apple manager John Jacobs, now DisplaySearch analyst, “when we said jump, they asked how high?” That's how Asustek learned a lot. ”
But despite all their success, companies like Asustek and MSI were outsiders. And when Asustek released its Eee netbook, large fish like Dell, HP and Apple didn’t do anything for several months. “Other brands thought,“ Oh, and shit, ”” recalls Asustek marketing director Lilian Lin .
Dell and HP were not going to start making a laptop for $ 400, because they already sold laptops for $ 1000. Why do you have a good thing? MSI did not deal with laptops in general, and Asustek had a small business selling its own full-fledged computers under its own brand, mainly in Asia and Europe. Since Taiwanese were not interested in selling monstrous computers, they could enter the market with smaller, more rational models like Honda cars. Then, they knew how to design at an inexpensive price, after so many years of production of motherboards with an incredibly low rate of return.
Clayton M. Christensen’s “ Innovator 's Dilemma ” is an excellent proof that real breakthroughs almost always make upsets, because profitable companies rarely want to restructure their business models. “Netbooks are a classic Kristensen disruptive innovation,” said Willy Shih, a professor at the Harvard School of Entrepreneurship, who studied Quanta work on OLPC and the development of the Asustek netbook.
These Taiwanese firms, Shi argues, now have a huge influence in the personal computer industry. In the US, we consider branding and marketing, - the conviction of people that they should buy - as the main business functions. Asustek has proven that companies with real power are those that produce the desired products. Taiwanese laptop makers have an inquisitive mind that once characterized America, but that evaporated from here along with the American industrial base. As long as the production of laptops is underway, Taiwan essentially owns the market, since these devices were not produced in the required quantities anywhere else.
If you asked the presidents of Taiwanese computer companies a few years ago about relations with Dell, HP and Apple, they would say that these American companies are engaged in branding and sales, while developing and manufacturing products in Taiwan is outsourced. . Today Taiwan beliefs are increasingly opposed. “When I talk to them now,” Shi jokes, “they say:“ We outsource our branding and implementation to them . ”
“But what about Photoshop?” This is a standard question from those who do not take netbooks for children's toys. Of course, the plain 1.6GHz processor and Linux are not bad for reading mail and such stupid things as watching YouTube. But what to do when you need to do something really significant , like complex photo editing? Here, my friend, distributed computing will not help you.
To some extent this is true: really powerful applications, like Adobe Photoshop, require more powerful processors. But look at my experience: this spring, after my laptop under Windows XP began to hang twice a day, I formatted the disk. When it came to reinstalling the software, I could not find my Photoshop disk. I already forgot about it, until I did not have to correct the photo for a new blog entry. Disappointed, I got into the Web and found FotoFlexer , one of several free online photo editors. I uploaded my image, and in about a minute I had it cropped, made the colors more saturated and added sharpness.
Since then, I have not used Photoshop.
Understand, I like Photoshop. I am not writing this to say how cool I am or how much I hate paying for software. It's just harder for me to find a disk with Photoshop now than to use FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser application weighs only 900 kilobytes, and “for the average user to download them, just spit,” as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, the company that released this application, pointed out to me.
My experience with Photoshop is another example of how the software industry is changing. Previously, programmers had to release bloated applications with a huge number of functions because they had to guess what the user might want to do with them. But if you develop an application that lives in the world of distributed computing, you know what users are doing - you can watch them in real time. In Arbor Labs, it was found that users rarely do complex formatting: the most commonly used functions are writing text and capturing photos. Or take the Writely application, which eventually became a text processor in the Google Docs office suite: when Sam Schillace first launched it, he was surprised to find that sharing the document with several people turned out to be the most popular function.
“It used to be“ When I buy a drawing program, I’ll get a program with 5,000 functions. I have no idea about 2,000 of them, but I’ll get them just in case of fire, ”says Shillas. “Today it’s like this:“ Which of these programs is easily accessible? Which one works online? “Today, applications compete in quality, not in a number of functions.
Netbooks are so cheap that they change the economic foundation of the personal computer business. Last October, the British mobile operator Vodafone made a new offer to its users: if they enter into a two-year high-speed wireless connection contract with the operator, Vodafone gives them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. This is not the same as a free computer: it’s worth 1800 $, so Vodafone can afford to “give” users a netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered something similar: a $ 99 Acer Aspire to anyone who signs up for a two-year contract with AT & T to provide 3G connectivity.)
These proposals indicate that the computer market is developing like a mobile phone market. The computer from luxury becomes a subject of mass demand. It makes it hard to make money. What is really valuable - and for which people will pay at an exorbitant price - is the ability to communicate.
Thus, netbooks - a contrast shower for the computer industry. Of course, great to have a new fast-growing niche in the market. But in this niche, profitability is simply cheap: a netbook sells for $ 300, which is slightly higher than the sum of prices for its parts, and sometimes even lower. “The profitability of these pieces without a magnifying glass can not be discerned,” - jokes Paul Goldenberg (Paul Goldenberg), manager of Digital Gadgets, which created netbooks under the brand Sylvania. “Everyone says that“ now we are losing money, but we’ll be rising on volume, right? ””
Virtually every company in the industry has a business plan ruined by netbooks. Microsoft was going to finish selling Windows XP this summer, pushing shoppers toward a better Vista. But when Linux made a breakthrough on the netbook market, Microsoft quickly backed off and extended XP sales for another two years - especially for netbooks. Most experts suggest that Redmond (the location of Microsoft headquarters) may sell XP for netbooks at $ 15, that is, less than a quarter of the previous price. (Microsoft Vice President Brad Brooks (Brad Brooks) assured me that they are making “good money” on netbooks and that the company plans to make sure that their new Windows 7 operating system can work on netbooks - Vista, in fact, cannot .) For its part, Intel sells millions of its low-power Atom processors to netbook manufacturers. “For us, this is a new billion-dollar market,” says Anil Nanduri , Technical Marketing Manager. True, this is without taking into account the fact that, for the company, the profit from Atom is only a small part of the profit from the sale of more powerful Celeron or Pentium in full-sized laptops.
The main horror for the PC industry is that the $ 300 device is so good that most people don’t even think about buying a $ 1,000 laptop. marketers from the industry are praying for netbooks to occupy the “younger brother” niche - a small mobile device that you buy when you already have a full-fledged laptop. But it is also possible that the next time you change an outdated laptop, you will go to the store and ask yourself: “Why do I have to pay so much money for a computer that I use only for mail and the Internet?” And this day Microsoft, Intel , Dell, HP and Lenovo will feel the end is coming.
It is possible that the decision is not in the hands of America. More precisely, living in the US, where netbooks are just emerging, it is difficult to understand how popular they became in Europe and Asia and to what extent they have already changed the landscape of the market. As Shi told me, he spoke with one bump in one of the largest Taiwanese laptop companies, and he said that ““ my next billion buyers will come from there. ”And he meant not the United States. He meant BRIC countries - Brazil , Russia, India, China - where billions of low-income people are just going to buy their first computer, and the fate of the computer industry in the next few years will depend on their solution - Windows or Linux, Microsoft software or distributed computing.
Netbooks can contribute to the production of even more incredibly cheap lightweight computers. “When everything you do is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why then the motherboard? ”- asks OLPC designer Mary Lou Jespen. “Especially if you want to save batteries. Why not make a screen and a really cheap radio chip with a price from 2 to 5 dollars? ”Distributed computing will probably become much more powerful in areas where you cannot imagine. AMD is working on an experimental farm of three-dimensional graphics servers that will run the most demanding games, and the image will be streamed to mobile devices, so that you can play even the most voracious games without having a powerful processor on your device. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, cites data that in 2007, in order to play Crysis, gamers had to buy particularly powerful desktops, with a lot of memory and video cards of $ 600 each. “Now imagine that you have servers running Crysis, and that they display a picture on an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors you are targeting in the game.”
Because this is the future of iron. For some users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer incredibly fast water-cooled boxes and screens the size of your living room - for $ 2,000. For the rest - lawyers who want to work on the train, women who want to put something in a handbag - netbooks will prevail. This is the heyday of these very small cars.
© Wired
Original (English): The Little Time Hit The Big Time
Translation: © Maxim Melnikov , valem-mipt , Passerby , Gleb , Gargo .
These cost constraints forced her to become damn inventive. She abandoned rotating hard drives in favor of flash memory — the one used in USB flash drives — because she consumes very little power and does not “die” when dropped. As software she chose Linux and other free, open packages, rather than paid software from Microsoft. She used an AMD Geode processor , which was not too fast, but consumed less than one watt of power. But the main charm was that Jepsen developed the original LCD display, which determines when the image is static (for example, when you read a document) and “orders” the processor to shut down in order to save precious electric power.
For the production of this laptop, called XO-1, the project One Laptop per Child hired a Taiwanese company Quanta . This is an unfamiliar company, however, Quanta is the largest laptop maker in the world. Probably, it is strange, but the details of the computer that is on your desk, whether it is Apple, Dell or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta, and, perhaps, even developed by her. Like many Taiwanese computer makers, Quanta has some of the coolest engineers on the planet. They solved many of the most complex engineering challenges posed by Mary Lou Jepsen, and by 2007 OLPC was ready. Poor children can get their own laptop, if not for $ 100, then for a bit more expensive.
Inspired (and perhaps a little scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek , a longtime competitor to Quanta in Taiwan and the 7th largest notebook maker in the world, began making its own cheap, low-end computer. It also had to be cheap due to the use of flash memory, a thin 7-inch screen and Linux OS. It lacked a DVD drive and it was not able to run programs like Photoshop. However, Asustek has labeled this laptop mainly as a machine for checking email and web surfing. As users of Asustek, its users were supposed to be children, retirees, and a developing middle class in India or China who cannot afford a $ 1,000 laptop.
')
But everything turned out completely different. When Asustek released its Eee PC in the fall of 2007, as many as 350 thousand of these netbooks diverged in a few months. Eee PCs were not bought in poor countries, but they were liked by people from the middle class in Western Europe and the USA who wanted a second laptop that fits in a small bag so that you can climb on YouTube or Facebook at any time. Soon other manufacturers of PCs - Dell, HP, Lenovo; almost every American computer maker has thrown a tiny netbook into the market under the "up to $ 400" category.
If you think about it, all this is extremely strange. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware manufacturing business. Usually, production moves down from the high end to the mass market. Computer manufacturers initially target products with new and cool features. And only years later, those innovations come in models of the low-end class.
But the development of Jepsen, on the contrary, moved up the path. In the process of creating a laptop to meet the needs of the poor, she discovered an amazing thing for ordinary PC users. They don't want more from a laptop - give them less.
Comparison: laptop vs netbook
Many netbooks change fast embedded processors and capacious hard drives of full-sized laptops for online applications and small, but fast, solid-state drives. And what is the result? Cool car for a third price.
| Lenovo ThinkPad T500 Laptop | Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook Netbook | |
| Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 GHz | CPU | Intel Atom N270 Single Core 1.6 GHz |
| Microsoft Windows Vista Home | operating system | Ubuntu Linux 8.04 |
| 1024 MB | RAM | 512 MB |
| 80 GB hard drive | Disk space | 4 GB solid state drive |
| 15.4 inches, 1280 Ă— 800 pixels | Display size | 8.9 inches, 1024 Ă— 600 pixels |
| 802.11b / g | Wireless connection | 802.11b / g |
| $ 959 | Cost of | $ 299 |
By the end of 2008, Asustek sold 5 million netbooks, and another 10 million sold the rest of the brands (Europe generally bought abrupt netbooks; sales there were eight times higher than in the US). In one year, netbooks captured 7 percent of the global laptop market. Next year, this figure will rise to 12 percent .
“We began to push technology to the bottom of the pyramid,” says Jepsen, “but the top of the pyramid also needs it.” This part of the upward innovation — this netbook — can fundamentally change the computer industry — if it doesn't kill it first.
I wrote this material on a netbook, and if you looked through my shoulder, you would see only two icons on my desktop: Firefox and Recycle Bin. And that's all.
It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do at the computer can now be done through the browser. I use it for communication on Twitter and Facebook, as well as for blogging. Meebo.com allows me to simultaneously use several online pagers. Last.fm lets you listen to music, and webmail replaces a regular email client. Instead of a word processor, I use Google Docs, and if I need to record a video, I can do it directly from my webcam to YouTube. If you think about the fact that the documents are not on the netbook, I'm not sure that I even have to delete them.
Netbooks have stopped performance wars. They existed when you came to the electronics store for the sake of buying a computer, choosing the most powerful one you could imagine. Why? Who knew? Maybe one day you would have to play a modern video game or edit the best indie snapshot. For 15 years, the computer industry has threatened us with paranoia “what if?”, Imparting performance. Intel and AMD threw out fast chips, hard drives caught up with a terabyte gallop, the RAM was torn, and high-end video cards allowed you to play Blu-ray movies on your clumsy 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.
But here's the catch: most of the time we do nothing. Our most common tasks — mail, web surfing, streaming video — require very little processing power. Only some people, like graphic designers or gamers, really need a powerful hardware. For many years, the personal computer industry was similar to car factories producing SUVs: they stupidly advanced powerful cars because profit margins were high while customers enjoyed fantasies as they drove off-road; only on the roads they ride and did not have to. Similarly, programmers abused excess capacity for writing very cumbersome applications and operating systems.
What really managed to make the creators of netbooks, so it is to turn the clock back: their machines work at the level of laptops four years ago. And it turns out that those capacities are more or less enough. "Ordinary computers are so fast that you can hardly find any differences between 1.6 and 2.2 GHz," said Andy Tung, vice president of MSI (Taiwan netbook maker Wind) for US sales. "We can find the difference between one and a couple of seconds, but not between one and two ten thousandths." The factor of the brakes of most of the current tasks assigned to the computer is not iron - these are other problems. They are outside. Is the Wi-Fi signal level normal? Once again fell Twitter?
Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for . That is, there is a small list of things that can be done online. It felt Asustek. The company received a laptop with a price of less than $ 300, creating a device that is absolutely useless without the Network. Think of it: the original Eee flash memory was only 4GB. It is so small that you have to store your images, videos and other files on the Web, setting the minimum amount of software on the netbook itself - simply because of the lack of disk space.
Netbooks prove that distributed computing is no longer an empty sound. Now it makes sense to develop computers for which resource-intensive tasks are performed "on the side". The tail of distributed computing is wagging a computer hardware dog.
Most consumers have never heard of Taiwanese little-known personal computer makers, but they have stood behind some of the most important hardware of the past thirty years. Quanta, in the eighties, for the first time realized the beauty of supplying new components to laptops. Then, in 2001, Apple placed an order with the company for the complete development of the G4 laptop. This laptop was an incredible success, and Quanta soon began to develop for other major manufacturers of personal computers. Asustek and MSI - two other huge Taiwanese laptop makers - have also moved from manufacturing motherboards alone to building technology from mobile phones to LCD panels. These companies were huge: sales of Quanta last year amounted to $ 25 billion - more than companies like Amazon.com, Texas Instruments and Electronic Arts.
Even despite the fact that Taiwanese manufacturers have remained subordinate to well-known computer brands, they receive a lot of knowledge over the years. For example, when Intel created its x486 chip in 1988, Asustek made its compatible motherboard before the release of the original from Intel itself. Later, Asustek produced components for laptops from Apple. “Nine times out of ten,” recalls former Apple manager John Jacobs, now DisplaySearch analyst, “when we said jump, they asked how high?” That's how Asustek learned a lot. ”
But despite all their success, companies like Asustek and MSI were outsiders. And when Asustek released its Eee netbook, large fish like Dell, HP and Apple didn’t do anything for several months. “Other brands thought,“ Oh, and shit, ”” recalls Asustek marketing director Lilian Lin .
Dell and HP were not going to start making a laptop for $ 400, because they already sold laptops for $ 1000. Why do you have a good thing? MSI did not deal with laptops in general, and Asustek had a small business selling its own full-fledged computers under its own brand, mainly in Asia and Europe. Since Taiwanese were not interested in selling monstrous computers, they could enter the market with smaller, more rational models like Honda cars. Then, they knew how to design at an inexpensive price, after so many years of production of motherboards with an incredibly low rate of return.
Clayton M. Christensen’s “ Innovator 's Dilemma ” is an excellent proof that real breakthroughs almost always make upsets, because profitable companies rarely want to restructure their business models. “Netbooks are a classic Kristensen disruptive innovation,” said Willy Shih, a professor at the Harvard School of Entrepreneurship, who studied Quanta work on OLPC and the development of the Asustek netbook.
These Taiwanese firms, Shi argues, now have a huge influence in the personal computer industry. In the US, we consider branding and marketing, - the conviction of people that they should buy - as the main business functions. Asustek has proven that companies with real power are those that produce the desired products. Taiwanese laptop makers have an inquisitive mind that once characterized America, but that evaporated from here along with the American industrial base. As long as the production of laptops is underway, Taiwan essentially owns the market, since these devices were not produced in the required quantities anywhere else.
If you asked the presidents of Taiwanese computer companies a few years ago about relations with Dell, HP and Apple, they would say that these American companies are engaged in branding and sales, while developing and manufacturing products in Taiwan is outsourced. . Today Taiwan beliefs are increasingly opposed. “When I talk to them now,” Shi jokes, “they say:“ We outsource our branding and implementation to them . ”
“But what about Photoshop?” This is a standard question from those who do not take netbooks for children's toys. Of course, the plain 1.6GHz processor and Linux are not bad for reading mail and such stupid things as watching YouTube. But what to do when you need to do something really significant , like complex photo editing? Here, my friend, distributed computing will not help you.
To some extent this is true: really powerful applications, like Adobe Photoshop, require more powerful processors. But look at my experience: this spring, after my laptop under Windows XP began to hang twice a day, I formatted the disk. When it came to reinstalling the software, I could not find my Photoshop disk. I already forgot about it, until I did not have to correct the photo for a new blog entry. Disappointed, I got into the Web and found FotoFlexer , one of several free online photo editors. I uploaded my image, and in about a minute I had it cropped, made the colors more saturated and added sharpness.
Since then, I have not used Photoshop.
Understand, I like Photoshop. I am not writing this to say how cool I am or how much I hate paying for software. It's just harder for me to find a disk with Photoshop now than to use FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser application weighs only 900 kilobytes, and “for the average user to download them, just spit,” as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, the company that released this application, pointed out to me.
My experience with Photoshop is another example of how the software industry is changing. Previously, programmers had to release bloated applications with a huge number of functions because they had to guess what the user might want to do with them. But if you develop an application that lives in the world of distributed computing, you know what users are doing - you can watch them in real time. In Arbor Labs, it was found that users rarely do complex formatting: the most commonly used functions are writing text and capturing photos. Or take the Writely application, which eventually became a text processor in the Google Docs office suite: when Sam Schillace first launched it, he was surprised to find that sharing the document with several people turned out to be the most popular function.
“It used to be“ When I buy a drawing program, I’ll get a program with 5,000 functions. I have no idea about 2,000 of them, but I’ll get them just in case of fire, ”says Shillas. “Today it’s like this:“ Which of these programs is easily accessible? Which one works online? “Today, applications compete in quality, not in a number of functions.
Netbooks are so cheap that they change the economic foundation of the personal computer business. Last October, the British mobile operator Vodafone made a new offer to its users: if they enter into a two-year high-speed wireless connection contract with the operator, Vodafone gives them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. This is not the same as a free computer: it’s worth 1800 $, so Vodafone can afford to “give” users a netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered something similar: a $ 99 Acer Aspire to anyone who signs up for a two-year contract with AT & T to provide 3G connectivity.)
These proposals indicate that the computer market is developing like a mobile phone market. The computer from luxury becomes a subject of mass demand. It makes it hard to make money. What is really valuable - and for which people will pay at an exorbitant price - is the ability to communicate.
Thus, netbooks - a contrast shower for the computer industry. Of course, great to have a new fast-growing niche in the market. But in this niche, profitability is simply cheap: a netbook sells for $ 300, which is slightly higher than the sum of prices for its parts, and sometimes even lower. “The profitability of these pieces without a magnifying glass can not be discerned,” - jokes Paul Goldenberg (Paul Goldenberg), manager of Digital Gadgets, which created netbooks under the brand Sylvania. “Everyone says that“ now we are losing money, but we’ll be rising on volume, right? ””
Virtually every company in the industry has a business plan ruined by netbooks. Microsoft was going to finish selling Windows XP this summer, pushing shoppers toward a better Vista. But when Linux made a breakthrough on the netbook market, Microsoft quickly backed off and extended XP sales for another two years - especially for netbooks. Most experts suggest that Redmond (the location of Microsoft headquarters) may sell XP for netbooks at $ 15, that is, less than a quarter of the previous price. (Microsoft Vice President Brad Brooks (Brad Brooks) assured me that they are making “good money” on netbooks and that the company plans to make sure that their new Windows 7 operating system can work on netbooks - Vista, in fact, cannot .) For its part, Intel sells millions of its low-power Atom processors to netbook manufacturers. “For us, this is a new billion-dollar market,” says Anil Nanduri , Technical Marketing Manager. True, this is without taking into account the fact that, for the company, the profit from Atom is only a small part of the profit from the sale of more powerful Celeron or Pentium in full-sized laptops.
The main horror for the PC industry is that the $ 300 device is so good that most people don’t even think about buying a $ 1,000 laptop. marketers from the industry are praying for netbooks to occupy the “younger brother” niche - a small mobile device that you buy when you already have a full-fledged laptop. But it is also possible that the next time you change an outdated laptop, you will go to the store and ask yourself: “Why do I have to pay so much money for a computer that I use only for mail and the Internet?” And this day Microsoft, Intel , Dell, HP and Lenovo will feel the end is coming.
It is possible that the decision is not in the hands of America. More precisely, living in the US, where netbooks are just emerging, it is difficult to understand how popular they became in Europe and Asia and to what extent they have already changed the landscape of the market. As Shi told me, he spoke with one bump in one of the largest Taiwanese laptop companies, and he said that ““ my next billion buyers will come from there. ”And he meant not the United States. He meant BRIC countries - Brazil , Russia, India, China - where billions of low-income people are just going to buy their first computer, and the fate of the computer industry in the next few years will depend on their solution - Windows or Linux, Microsoft software or distributed computing.
Netbooks can contribute to the production of even more incredibly cheap lightweight computers. “When everything you do is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why then the motherboard? ”- asks OLPC designer Mary Lou Jespen. “Especially if you want to save batteries. Why not make a screen and a really cheap radio chip with a price from 2 to 5 dollars? ”Distributed computing will probably become much more powerful in areas where you cannot imagine. AMD is working on an experimental farm of three-dimensional graphics servers that will run the most demanding games, and the image will be streamed to mobile devices, so that you can play even the most voracious games without having a powerful processor on your device. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, cites data that in 2007, in order to play Crysis, gamers had to buy particularly powerful desktops, with a lot of memory and video cards of $ 600 each. “Now imagine that you have servers running Crysis, and that they display a picture on an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors you are targeting in the game.”
Because this is the future of iron. For some users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer incredibly fast water-cooled boxes and screens the size of your living room - for $ 2,000. For the rest - lawyers who want to work on the train, women who want to put something in a handbag - netbooks will prevail. This is the heyday of these very small cars.
© Wired
Original (English): The Little Time Hit The Big Time
Translation: © Maxim Melnikov , valem-mipt , Passerby , Gleb , Gargo .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/59562/
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