“Sounds silly, just as silly as Della is. Netbooks and laptops are presented as fashion statements, and the site’s ‘tech tips’ includes a feature, ‘Seven Unexpected Ways a Netbook Can Change Your Life,” which starts out by saying, “Once you get beyond how cute they are, you’ll find that netbooks can do a lot more than check your e-mail.'”
thefickler touts an interview in tech.blorge with Lenovo’s Worldwide Competitive Analyst, Matt Kohut, who spoke about his vision of the future of netbooks, which involves Windows 7, bigger screens, built-in 3G, touch integration, and lower prices. Linux fans will be disappointed to hear that Kohut thinks Windows 7 will dominate future generations of netbooks because it offers a better, more familiar solution, with the benefits of touch. Quoting Kohut: “The other challenge has been, in order to keep the price points down, a lot of people thought that Linux would be the savior of all of these netbooks. You know, there were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves or 0 or whatever it happens to be, based on Microsoft’s pricing and, again, from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns because people didn’t know what to do with it. Linux, even if you’ve got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows. So, we’ve seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and it’s ready to go.”
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Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: “Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we’re flying now!).”
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Are netbooks good or bad for the PC industry? The three m’s—the message, Microsoft, and money—will be the ultimate deciding factors.
Ultraportable laptops – netbooks such as the Eee PC – are becoming increasingly popular. A computer that’s small enough to live permanently in your bag without giving you backache can be incredibly useful, especially as wireless connectivity and 3G hardware are growing in ubiquity.
“Microsoft’s model is not working anymore,” thundered trade journal InformationWeek. “Netbooks hammer Windows revenues for second straight quarter,” declared Greg Keizer of ComputerWorld, another respected trade weekly. – Also, trying to vendor-lock users to the IE browser by making web-apps that only work well with it, is a “Losing Strategy”.
An anonymous reader writes “Over on the PC World blog, Keir Thomas engages in some speculative thinking. Pretending to be writing from the year 2025, he describes a world of ‘Good Enough computing,’ wherein ultra-cheap PCs and notebooks (created to help end-users weather the ‘Great Recession’ of the early 21st century) are coupled to open source operating systems. This is possible because even the cheapest chips have all the power most people need nowadays. In what is effectively the present situation with netbooks writ large, he sees a future where Microsoft is priced out of the entire desktop operating system market and can’t compete. It’s a fun read that raises some interesting points.”
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I had to read this story Lenovo analyst: Linux on netbooks is doomed” several times because I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Was this really Lenovo’s Worldwide Competitive Analyst saying things like “You have to know how to decompile codes and upload data”? Really?
In its Spanish, French, British and German sites, Dell lists the Ubuntu-preloaded computers it offers. But not all of them! It shows only Ubuntu netbooks and hides the others. For example, the hidden trick to get a Dell XPS laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled is to get in touch with sales representatives and they’ll give you a link to purchase it.
A Microsoft blogger says that the Windows operating system has achieved dominance in the netbook market. The statistics, however, are less definitive. Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, says that Linux still has strong prospects on little laptops.
