They wanted to create a "small and beautiful company". After 30 years, Asus is a giant who is not afraid of innovation

You know what the name Asus means? These are the last letters of the word "Pegasus", meaning Pegasus - a mythological, winged horse, symbolizing creative inspiration.

Not many people know that the four founders of the company - TH Tung, Ted Hsu, Wayne Hsieh and MT Liao shortened the name of the mythical horse to his last four letters, to ... be as high as possible in the phone book. Although it may be just an urban legend.

The legend is not the fact that the four gentlemen in 1989 abandoned their previous work and in a small cafe in Taipei dreamed of creating a "small and beautiful company".

This "small and beautiful company" is today a real giant on the consumer electronics market. Asus products are spreading in millions of copies around the world, and at every step the company proves that commercial success did not overshadow the original vision of creating a brand that every other product puts it on "new heights of quality and innovation".

Over the 30 years of its history, Asus has proved many times that he is not afraid to take risks and stands faithful to his motto: in search of incredible . What's more, quoting American business gurus, "why?" For every "how?". Each innovative product that came out of the hands of the company's engineers was created in response to the needs of users. Even if they were niche products that were not created to gain commercial popularity, their genesis always took place at the interface between the specific needs of a certain group of consumers and the unique and somewhat ... crazy concepts of the creators.

"Unique and a bit crazy" perfectly reflects the spirit of Asus over the last 30 years.

Asus is such a paradox company. On the one hand, it launches quite conservative products: smartphones with classic shapes and inexpensive personal computers that will speak to a statistical consumer.

On the other hand, every now and then it presents a product completely detached from reality, in the most positive sense of the word. Who closely follows our relationship with the Computex 2019, saw the new Asus ZenBook Pro Duo laptop, with an additional screen between the main display and the keyboard. And this is not the first example of asus 'madness'.

Looking through the company's timeline, we find a lot of strange, innovative, maybe even crazy products. Lots of "first in the world" concepts. Some of them have stood the test of time, others have fallen out of reality.

However, there was not a year in the company's history in which it would not show something that no rival would be proud of and constantly pushing the entire market forward, presenting bolder and more bold solutions. Like ROG Mothership, shown at the beginning of this year, a crazy 2-in-1 PC for players, which does not have a chance for mass commercial success, but sends a clear message to the world: we are not afraid of revolutionizing the market.

It all started with the motherboard.

Asus did not start conquering the market from laptops or phones, which can be associated by the average consumer, but from PC hardware - a market where it is one of the most powerful players to this day.

Just 8 months from the day the company was founded, the first products were released: motherboards Cache 386/33 and ISA 486/25, dedicated to IBM and ALR personal computers.

Laptops, of which the company is mainly known today, joined the Asus portfolio in 1997, when P6300 saw the light of day. Since then, hundreds of iterations of computers from the Taiwanese giant have appeared on the market, shaking the market.

It is said that this MacBook Air has revolutionized the world of laptops. However, this is an incomplete picture of the revolution.

In the same year that Steve Jobs showed the world a thin, light, innovative and ... abstractly expensive MacBook Air, on the other side of the globe Asus presented a completely different approach to mobility.

Maybe not as thin and beautiful as an aluminum MacBook, but it's affordable. Speaking of Eee PC, of ​​course.

The Polish branch of the company officially translated this name as Education, (R) evolution, Emotions. As for the emotions, you can enter into a polemic, but certainly you can not deny that it was the Eee PC that initiated a real revolution in education and mobile work, at the same time giving rise to a real flood of the so-called. Netbooks - not very efficient, but at the same time extremely mobile personal computers, which dominated the segment of portable computers up to the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century.

Then, ultrabooks appeared on the market.

While netbooks have satisfied the need for a cheap and mobile device for work, they were undoubtedly lacking two things: performance and beauty.

Asus responded to this need in 2011, giving rise to a new brand - ZenBook.

ZenBook UX21E was one of the first products produced by a Microsoft partner that could actually compete with the MacBook Air, while significantly eroding it.

Until today, ZenBooks remain among the best mobile personal computers, offering an excellent price-performance ratio, mobility and performance. With each subsequent generation, Asus has refined its ultrabooks and the computers that started as a response to the MacBook Air have long since ceased to look at Apple's actions and simply provide consumers with what they need most: a great tool in a beautiful package and affordable price .

At the same time with the premiere of the first ZenBook and entering the conservative category of ultrabooks, Asus showed something completely out of this world - the world's first mobile 2in1 computer: the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

In addition to the category of ultra-mobile devices, Asus was also not passive.

Today, we look with admiration at the impressive Asus ZenBook Pro Duo with a double screen, but the way it was started actually more than a decade ago, when Asus used an innovative trackpad for the first time - just touch the switch to have digits on the laptop touchpad. The same patent returned a year ago in the form of NumberPad, which allowed Asus on the one hand to reduce the excess housing in the new ZenBook ultrabooks, while retaining the functionality of the numeric block used by many consumers.

The dual-use concept for the trackpad, however, went a step further when Asus presented the touchpad in the ZenBook Pro, which is in fact an additional display. Asus ScreenPad allows you to use the second screen at work and entertainment, for example by displaying the YouTube video on the trackpad, or by placing on it helpful information useful in working on the document. There were also other functions, such as a built-in calculator or multimedia controller. All this to squeeze as much as possible from the limited space of a small ultrabook.

Asus did not snooze the mobile revolution.

Since 2003, when the company showed its first phone, Asus gradually strengthened its position on the mobile market. In the era of smartphones, he created devices working both under the control of Windows Phone and Android, without being afraid to experiment with forms, which can be exemplified by the Asus PadFone series presented in 2011: a smartphone with a 4.3-inch display, which could be docked on a 10.1 "screen. Two years later, Asus went a step further and showed the 3 in 1 device: the Asus TranformerBook Trio. They were really crazy concepts that ... surprisingly made a lot of sense. Instead of three separate devices: one.

History has shown that although the form in which Asus tried to solve this problem, the concept of using a smartphone as a computer was the right one; Did not the same originate the creators of desktop mode in smartphones with Windows 10 Mobile, or Samsung with their DeX? Even Google is working on a desktop version of Android today that will allow you to change your phone into a desktop computer.

Another solution, the same problem. Which Asus was the first to try to solve.

The real strength in the mobile world of Asus, however, only became in 2014, when the ZenFone brand debuted, and with it the first models: ZenFone 6, ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 4, instantly winning the hearts of consumers around the world with an excellent price-quality ratio .

ZenFones are still gaining popularity, and even the latest premiere of the new Asus ZenFone 6 shows that even on the conservative smartphone market, the company can still afford innovative and unconventional solutions - such as an unusual, rotating camera, which is both a main camera and a selfie camera.

Asus has been winning the hearts of players since 2006.

It was then that Asus brought to life the ROG brand Republic of Gamers, loved today by players around the world. Today, the brand covers everything: from PC components, through computers, laptops, monitors, controllers to the telephone. Then, however, it started as a foothold for computer components dedicated to players, showing the world the first motherboard designed for overclocking: ROG Crosshair.

The first ROG computer was released in 2011. It was a ROG CG8565 desktop, which was soon joined by the first headphones, a sound card and a motherboard controlled from the mobile application on the smartphone. Since then, the ROG brand has been constantly growing in strength, and today it is one of the most, if not the most recognizable gaming brand among #PCMasterRace, leading not only in the category of stationary equipment for players, but also in mobile devices - Zephyrus series laptops are devices with excellent performance ratio to the slimness of the housing, and portable monsters like ROG Mothership provide desktop performance in a relatively mobile design.

For 30 years, Asus has become a brand for everyone.

The company, which started out as a modest producer of motherboards, now has a product for every user in its portfolio. And just as we usually say that "if there is something for everything, it's good", Asus seems to win in every field.

Players have the Republic of Gamers brand, including some of the best laptops on the market, PC components, monitors and great accessories.

Professionals have at their disposal excellent ZenBooks, from powerful ZenBooks Pro, competing with MacBooks Pro, to slim and light ultrabooks. In addition, Asus manufactures some of the best professional monitors in the world, especially in this price class.

The average consumer can choose from the sea of ​​laptops and desktops of the company, adding to this inexpensive, but still very good monitor and a set of accessories.

The mobile technology fan can choose between successful company smartphones: from the cheapest ZenFone Max to the powerful ROG Phone along with its dedicated accessories.

And with all this diversification portfolio Asus has consistently shown for 30 years that it is not afraid of innovation in any field. Regardless of which product section we look at, we will find both conservative products for the average consumer and crazy concepts that will appeal to the most Geek's hearts.

30 years of beautiful history

When four engineers in 1989 were sitting in a cafe dreaming about the future of their company, they probably did not foresee the unprecedented scale to which their business would grow.

They can, however, congratulate you. Maybe the creation of a "small" company did not quite work for them, but even with such a huge scale it is impossible to deny that they have certainly managed to create something beautiful.

* The material was created in cooperation with the Asus brand

They wanted to create a "small and beautiful company". After 30 years, Asus is a giant who is not afraid of innovation