An interesting piece of news from Asus’s press conference is that the Eee PC is their “most successful product ever,” according to Engadget. This is potentially huge news for Linux on two levels.

First, Asus is no small company. While they may not be well known to many people, if you have ever been in the market for a new motherboard, you know the name Asus. For a company of this size, saying a product is the most successful product ever is no small statement. Granted, motherboards are rarely “successful,” but they sell other products too. Hopefully, the huge success of the Eee PC will cause Asus to try using Linux on more devices. It already appears that they are open to this, since they have put a technology called Splashtop (or ExpressGate), which is a fast-booting Linux system, on some of their motherboards, but this success should make them even more anxious to try out Linux on more devices.

(Note: I am sure someone is going to say “but it was the hardware that made the Eee PC sell.” That may be true, but do you think that Windows would run as well as Linux on a device with such limited resources? Also, without Linux, the price would have been higher.)

Second, the buzz the Asus Eee PC will (or at least should) get for announcing a WiMAX equipped model and being called the most successful product ever by Asus should help it to sell even more units. See the first point again.

Related posts:

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