Computex 2008, small laptops are the future
I visited Taiwan last week and I sneaked into one of the pavilions of Computex. This trade show is the second biggest in the world and is the place where the Taiwanese integrators sell their products to the big brands. This year the focus was in Broadband Wireless Telecommunications (Wimax in some variant) and on small cheap laptops. Basically all the companies where introducing some sort of Asus EEE PC clone.
Computex on Taipei 101
I didn’t have a lot of time to explore the trade show but in the few minutes I was there I didn’t see anything that caught my eye. Furthermore I think we visited the worst pavilion because none of the big Taiwanese companies where there. Indeed it was the pavilion where the Microsoft booth was. Of course I took a picture with one cute Taiwanese Microsoft hostess. You can see in the picture the interesting slogan Microsoft had in the Computex: “Better with windows!” encouraging people to use Windows on the sub 300 USD laptops.
Microsoft’s Taiwanese Hostess
Microsoft knows that they have a problem. As more of our time in front of computers is using web applications instead of desktop ones, more and more people will start using small cheap laptops. A huge chunk of the market is going to be on this small form laptops and they will probably replace all the normal laptops in the future. Microsoft is in a position where Linux is going to be eroding their user base. The problem is that vista will never run properly on these laptops (plus nobody likes vista) and must rely on Windows XP to compete with modern Linux distributions.
As LCDs are not anymore the stars in the trade shows, the manufacturers try
to attract attention showing ballistic missiles from the neighbor North Korea.
Next year they will try porn.
It will take time though because most of the cheap laptops in Computex were running Windows. I assume Microsoft marketing has something to be here, probably giving away for free or close to nothing the windows licences to the Taiwanese manufacturers. An intelligent positioning or a desperate move depending on your point of view but a sign that they are worried anyway.