Asus to phase out 7-inch Eee PC netbooks

At the recent CeBIT 2009, Asus Chair Jonney Shih announced his company will be phasing out the original 7" Eee PC models in mature markets, although it may continue to sell it in emerging countries that show demand. Asus will instead concentrate on its 8.9" and 10" lines - models that do not necessarily adhere to its original affordable netbook/cloud computing vision.

As further evidence of the turn-around, the Eee brand, which had originally meant "Easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play", now stands for "Easy, excellent, exciting." Ever since the successful launch of the Asus Eee PC, the company has been leveraging the brand, expanding the line to include monitors, videophones, all-in-one PCs, nettops, and an overwhelming range of netbook models.

The dilution, specifically the move to higher-priced models, arguably has been a major mistake since Asus not only lost its early dominance in the very market segment it created, the term Eee PC has since lost its iconic connotation as an affordable netbook. Meanwhile, none of the other Eee-branded products has been exactly a bestseller, putting the Eee brand in some sort of limbo.

Ironically, in a nod to the original Eee PC's trendsetting breakthrough, mainland Chinese manufacturers/resellers nowadays use the generic term EPC to refer to their own low-cost netbook products.