My letter to Asus

I have now sent my letter to Asus via the feedback form on the support page of their website.  If you endorse my vision, and believe that these netbooks could be the very valuable tool I believe they could be, then please visit their support page and make your feelings known.  And please register your support in the comments below.  If Asus cannot step up to this, then I shall find another company whose ear I shall bend, but I will not let this go!

Sirs, I am Head of Learning, ICT & Business, at an Academy in the UK. I am currently involved in planning for ICT provision in our new £26 million Academy building, due to be fully opened in 2012, and I have a vision for the Academy – one which I have shared with all of the Leadership Team and my teaching colleagues, and with many others in various conferences at which I have spoken.

The vision is for all teaching rooms to have a class set of netbook PCs, to be used by students wirelessly to access the Web and all of the cloud applications available there.  These netbooks would be students’ regular learning tools, to be taken off the shelves as and when they need them, rather than having to visit a suite of desktop PCs at a designated time.  And the machine at the centre of this vision is the Asus Eee PC 901. Perfect for web access, light, cheap, and with a long battery life, we would be looking to buy hundreds of these.

Unfortunately, however, I find that this model is no longer produced, and that all of its successors have hard discs, which render the machines more expensive and less durable, and which give the batteries less charge life. Without these ingredients – small size, light weight, durability, long battery life, low price - computers are totally unable to deliver what we require in the Academy.

Furthermore, the netbook makes a perfect client for virtualisation on a thin client network, using Xen technology. The fact that it has little memory and storage space is immaterial. Virtualisation will enable users to access all of the software on the network which has previously only been available to desktop PC users. What a phenomenal tool this is!

As well as promoting this vision at conferences, I am also blogging about it on http://ictgrump.blogspot.com , and the idea has attracted a great deal of support. I wonder if Asus have, in fact, missed a major marketing focus here.

Some weeks ago, Morgan Computers were selling the end of stock of their Eee PC 901s, and were advertising them as being perfect for very simple applications – web browsing, email and looking at photos. I wrote to them and pointed them to my blog, where I outline dozens of web-based applications which turn the netbook into a very powerful tool. Morgan created a link to my blog on their web page, and hundreds of potential buyers visited the blog to see what I had to say about the Eee PC.

My bottom line, sirs, is that I hope that I might be able to purchase from you the many Eee PC 901s which we will need at the academy, and, further, that you will consider bringing them back into production for promotion in the educational world, for use in the manner I have described. I know little of business, but it seems you have a massive business opportunity here.

I look forward to hearing from you on this.

Regards,