April 8th, 2009
How will Netbooks change our computing lives
Royal Pingdom has a post up about how Netbooks change the way we live. (Picture from JinJin80, a chef’s blog.)
It’s mostly tongue in cheek. Wardriving from the bathroom. Comparison shopping on the High Street. Copying recipes in a neighbor’s kitchen.
A lot of these are also smartphone applications. As I’ve said the difference between a smartphone and a Netbook in 2010 will be its case. Many will share chip sets and software.
Which leads me to ask, more seriously this time, how will Netbooks change our computing lives?
Despite the Microsoft triumphalism, they can’t be seen as a winner. Yet.
Winning the OS war here meant dropping XP at $3/copy. Even if you add old versions of common applications to that bundle, fact is you’re not making money, and you’re making your margins wafer thin.
You’re not going to spend $300 for software on a machine that cost you $200, maybe less. You’re going to use what came with the device, and treat it as disposable.
Instead of being an end in itself, which a laptop becomes, a Netbook is a means to the end, the end in this case being the Internet. Its competition, for better or worse, is the iPhone, and it competes based on an interface that can accommodate 10 fingers and a PC screen’s aspect ratio.
All of which means that the most important sale for a Netbook owner will be an automated “sync” service, one which assures any files you create or improve on the device are updated to a Web site that becomes your data’s real home.
Cheapskates may want to just use a stick memory and wait until they get home to sync up, so don’t go writing big business plans — even this service is going to be low-priced and low-margin.
My point is that, with a Netbook on the road joining your laptop back at home and the desktop at your office, not to mention the phone in your pocket, we are creating data in a lot of places, some of which we may want to save.
Which brings me to the picture above. Mise en place may be the big opportunity Netbooks make obvious.
What do you think?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/08/09
