Straight Talking: Minnows flourish at CES

Airport security and the success of the tiny Eee PC may well prompt consumers to move from Microsoft Windows to Linux

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association in America which stages the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and saw off Comdex, justifies the topsy-turvy growth of the sprawling event: “The beauty of shows is that anyone with an idea and very little money can be exposed. Bill Gates succeeded because of Comdex.”

I thought about this when I was doing what I always do when attending CES; taking advantage of the fact that not even the exhibition’s staff can decode the crazy aisle and booth numbering system, getting lost on the show floor and letting serendipity take over.

One small stand was showing equipment from the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. This will give children in developing nations a chance to learn IT skills and communicate. It has been viewed by some adults in developed nations as a sneaky cheap option for business use.

Now I don’t think so. The tiny keys will remind those with long memories of the early Sinclair computer keypads, once famously described as like shaking hands with a dead man. OLPC really is for children.

Not far away another small booth was demonstrating the Asus Eee PC, which will remind the same long-memoried of the first real portable PC, the wonderfully easy-to-use Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. A4 size, the 100 had a solid-state operating system from Microsoft in pre-DOS and Windows bloat days, a feelgood keyboard, small mono LCD screen and built-in modem (300bits/sec!). It switched on and off at the flick of a slider and ran for weeks on AA cells.

Compare that to a modern laptop with Windows which takes the first half of a plane trip to boot up, the other half to shut down and drains its rechargeables while doing so.

The Eee PC is half the size of most notebooks, weighs less than 1kg, is solid and comes with quick-boot Linux built to look like Windows. The keyboard is small but usable by adults.

Airport security is making it increasingly difficult to carry a full-sized laptop as hand luggage. So the first thing I did when I got back to the UK was go out with £220 to buy an Eee PC. But even before PCW’s rave reviews had hit the newsstands, every shop and website had completely sold out and PC World was not even taking orders.

I solved my problem by buying an end-of-line Packard Bell Easynote, which is around the same size and weight as an Eee PC, costs (on special offer) around £350 and is blessed with Windows XP rather than Vista. It’s slow but lets me escape the clutches of Vista. So my working tool’s Windows software still works.

Other companies now seeing the queues to buy Eee PCs are sure to launch Eee clones. This will stimulate the release of Linux versions of working tool apps. So the Asus punt may well have kick-started Linux as a consumer alternative to Windows.

Microsoft mishandled the Vista launch, with the press embarrassed into begging for review copies of software that turned out likely to screw up their PCs. I was in a BBC studio recently and the PCs were all still running XP. Many businesses are still using XP. NEC is now offering the option to use XP on new machines instead of Vista.

If Microsoft tries to force migration to Vista, more people will try Linux and discover that there can now be life without Windows.

There is a lot of conflicting information on the web about the shut-off dates for XP. I am not surprised because, when I asked Microsoft for horse’s mouth comment, what I got back was bewildering. I decoded and distilled, and asked Microsoft to confirm that my simple interpretation was correct. It was, so here it is.

Service Pack 3 for XP is due some time in 2008; retail sales of XP end in June 2008 and there will be no new PCs with XP after January 2009. From then on there will be five years of bug fixes and ten years of security updates. So XP will continue being tweaked for best performance until January 2014, and XP will get security updates until January 2019.

The bottom line is that there is absolutely no need to go Vista yet unless you want to.

This article appeared in the May 2008 issue of PCW.