Acer throwing their hand into the console market?
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Posted March 27th, 2008 at 1:13pm
by Corey Tamas
Blurbs about Acer entering the console market have been popping up here and there, and the company (best known for making computer gear) is certainly showing a lot of guts to go up against Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft in doing so. Never the less, rumblings like this post on Neogaf point inarguably at the real potential for an Acer console… and maybe not a bad one at that.
Right now, the Acer brand name is still equated with PC notebooks only, despite Acer’s acquisition of Gateway. But in an interview with BetaNews at its press event on Wednesday, Acer’s senior vice president, James T. Wong, said that his company has a game machine in mind, and that it will be based on “open standards.”“If you look at most of the other game machines that are out there right now — Nintendo’s, the Xbox — they are ‘closed’ and proprietary systems,” he told BetaNews.
Wong said that, beyond “openness,” all of the Acer-branded systems being eyed right now, including the game machine, are envisioned as offering new and innovative form factors and applications.
In addition to its future Acer-branded desktop PCs, however, Acer will also provide desktop systems under the Gateway name, as well as under the eMachines and Packard Bell brands inherited through the Gateway buyout, according to the senior VP. The Acer, Gateway, eMachines, and Packard Bell desktop systems will each incorporate two separate line-ups, one for consumers and the other for SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses), he said.
During a press conference attended by BetaNews earlier on Wednesday, which focused mainly on Acer’s notebook PC products and strategy, officials cited Gateway’s expertise in desktop systems as a big reason for buying that company.
But Wong told BetaNews that Acer had already been making desktop PCs for other vendors, anyway, with desktop systems constituting some 30 percent of Acer’s huge OEM business.
Acer, though, will not be offering either desktop or notebook PCs geared to enterprise use, at least for now, according to the executive.
“You need different kinds of resources for [enterprise systems], and we don’t have those kinds of resources right now,” he told BetaNews.
Of particular interest to me is Acer’s eschewing of the closed-system precedent set by the Wii, the Xbox and the Playstation… and, instead, their focus on an open system of some sort. I don’t know how they’ll do it, but if they manage to pull it off they may end up finding one of the few true ways to best the entrenched giants in the console market.
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