I've been watching the Asus EEE notebook's progress for a few months now. The early reports about a usable portable computer for $200 that boots very quickly seemed like a perfect answer to my goal of having a portable computer for MP3 and photo display,game changer?.
Why might the device be a "game changer"? Because, at least at the original price of $200 (I'm now seeing $299 and up depending upon things like flash drive size) it is a cheap enough device that people will buy it to solve one problem. Much like Mario Bros. sold one gazillion units of the 8-bit NES because, heck $99 to play as much Mario Bros. as you wanted was a good deal to a lot of folks. And once those people had the NES they ended up buying other games (maybe even a few that I wrote back in the day). This device runs Linux and, when it drops to $199, is cheap enough that I will get one as my portable MP3 player that also shows my .jpg photo album. At that point I, along with a lot of other folks who don't currently do so, will be using Linux on an every few days basis and discovering that non-Windows based computing is possible. And, for the price of one of the premium versions of Vista I will have a light weight and capable OS AND a computer to run it on.
Is this the end of Microsoft's dominance of the OS market? I don't think so but I do think that M$oft won't be able to continue to justify charging people $200 to upgrade their OS to something that offers no discernible new features, slower performance and DRM features that many of us really aren't into. It might not be the end but this really could be the device that starts to put Linux into the hands of average computer users in real numbers. And that, IMHO, is a very good thing.
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