The Jonney Machine
Intel pushed and prodded. Microsoft came in right at the end. How Taiwan's Asustek built its cheap laptop for grown-ups.
A year ago Jonney Shih was searching for a breakthrough. The Taiwan company he has run since 1994, Asustek, had become the world's largest maker of computer motherboards and one of the ten biggest laptop manufacturers. Once known for churning out cheap clones of name-brand laptops, Asustek began designing its own ten years ago and produced more than 4 million last year. "But we were still a second-class company," he says. "We were fighting fires, not thinking ahead."
But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups?
A bigger hurdle was designing the user interface, the first thing people see when they turn on the machine, and the screens that lead to the programs. Asustek decided that the Windows operating system was out of the question. The licensing costs would have been the most expensive part of the computer. So it decided to use Linux and build its own user interface, and that became the most time-consuming part of the project.
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