Entelligence: Netbooks, R.I.P.

Per Engadget, in a recent post, Entelligence blogger Michael Gartenberg suggests netbooks will be short-lived as a category. He argues netbooks are not a new product category since a netbook is "merely a laptop with the pivotal axis based on price first and foremost."

He bases his argument on the history. At yearend 2007 a netbook (or a $300 - $500 laptop) had a 7" screen, a tiny keyboard, about 4GB of storage, 512MB RAM and no Windows OS. Today that same price point gives you a 10-inch screen or so, 1GB RAM, perhaps 160GB HD, and Windows. By year's end, the specs will be 12" screens, full keyboards, and 300GB of storage. And they'll be called netbooks instead of laptops. It is Moore's law in action.

Gartenberg argues further that there have previously been tiny, underpowered laptops, in fact, for more than a decade. But these have always been overpriced. Netbooks changed that. However as prices came down and capabilities increased, more people bought them not as netbooks but as laptop replacements.

So far, so good.

But then, he offers his proof. The higher return rates of Linux netbooks as compared to Windows-based ones.

Huh??? Is he saying Linux-based netbooks (or laptops) can't be used as the primary computing device? Hmmm, this is highly debatable. Because the original intended market of the netbooks (especially in Third World countries) have always been users who do light computing - surfing, emailing, chatting, etc. Users, who for the most part, do not even know the difference between Windows and Linux and do not care to know. For them, netbooks serve their computing needs just fine. Gartenberg ought to check out third world computing. The rest of the world is not as Windows-centric as he might believe.

As for calling them netbooks or laptops, it is just a matter of semantics, although Gartenberg might be surprised to learn that for a lot of consumers, there's a world of difference between a 9" or a 10" netbook and a 12" model. 10" models have been around even before the onset of netbooks and vendors will likely continue to offer them. Weight, too, is another critical factor. Which makes me think - does Gartenberg even have a netbook that he carries around? Or has he even ever used one extensively?

One factor he also forgot to consider is cloud computing. Netbooks are called netbooks because they are meant to connect to the net. The previously so-called underpowered laptops of one or two generations ago are not actually that underpowered. They were meant to be desktop replacements in the field, after all. But, for the most part, they were used primarily as stand-alone mobile devices, connecting only via a dial-up modem (or to a LAN via the Ethernet port) every once in a while.

Since cloud computing shifts a lot of the required resources online, it makes underpowered netbooks feasible. The success of netbooks is actually the timely convergence of several technologies. But like anything electronics, netbooks have since gradually evolved. And as the lines between the early mainframes and minis had blurred into the PCs, netbooks and laptops will surely merge as well.

Bottom line, whether they are called netbooks or laptops does not really matter. To argue otherwise, or to put too much emphasis on the issue, is pointless.