Forbes Interview’s CEO of Asus
Posted in Linux Hardware | Comments are off for this postIntel signed on in February. Then, having committed money and manpower to the project, Intel told Shih and Shen that it wanted to see a prototype in one month. “When I heard that,” laughs Shen, “I told Jonney, ‘We’ve got nothing yet!'” Designers and engineers endured sleepless nights and long weekends and managed to put together the basics of the machine in time. Folks at Intel started calling it the Jonney machine.
A bigger hurdle was designing the user interface, the first thing people see when they turn on the machine, and the screens that lead to the programs. Asustek decided that the Windows operating system was out of the question. The licensing costs would have been the most expensive part of the computer. So it decided to use Linux and build its own user interface, and that became the most time-consuming part of the project.