Piestar

So, there’s been a big debacle recently about Microsoft and their ’3 app limit’ for netbooks.  Apart from the fact that it would probably contravene the Sale of Goods Act* (it’s a great law) it would cause no end of bad press as people try to do more and realise that they are limited for no other reason than greed.  After the tepid response Vista got and the promise of 7 they probably realise that they, in fact, really don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot again.

I do totally see where they are coming from though.  Prices of computers are dropping through the floor and you can pick up a decent laptop or netbook for under £300 (not to mention desktops) no problems now, which is a far cry from the Windows heyday of £1000+ machines.  What they really want is a flat percentage (or a ‘tax’ if you will) on the sales of every machine.  They want to make the money on the larger ticket items, but they also don’t want to abandon the netbook market.  Fair enough.

One of my old clients, who incidentally was actually old, had a desktop PC.  It was about 4 years old and ran Windows 98 (If I remember correctly).  Anyway he got a new laptop, which was running XP, (this is an old story) as he left the country quite a lot.  Yet he always insisted on using the desktop pc running 98 when he was at home as he considered it to be better as it was ‘full size’, and since the laptop is just a mini portable computer it can’t be as good, can it?

Anyway my wife’s venerable old (three years old!) laptop finally died a death so I impulse bought her a Samsung NC-10 as I had heard good things about it and it was just so cute.

Old Specs: 800mhz-ish Celeron, 256mb RAM**, 40gb HDD, 1280×1024 screen, 2hrs battery
New Specs: 1.6ghz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160gb HDD, 1024×600 screen, 5hrs battery

The simple truth is that netbooks are to laptops what laptops are to desktops.  Sure the keyboard is a touch smaller but it’s fine once you get used to it and the screen isn’t a problem either – and these facts are easily offset by the insane battery life and the fact that it is actually portable (it’s so light you can stick it in a handbag).

Sure there is a small proportion of the population that would require something better – developers, gamers, graphics peeps – I myself have 2×21″ monitors on my main workstation – but for 95% of the people who just want email, facebook and iTunes, it is literally all they need.  Think of it this way – the average new netbook is probably going to be more capable than the average man-off-of-the-street’s current laptop.

I am not going to make any predictions about the future – I’ve seen too many people fail spectacularly at that in the past – but I am fairly sure that the netbook market is going to put more than a serious dent in the normal laptop market over the next few years.  I also distinctly remember many years ago making exactly the same argument that laptops would eclipse desktops – and outside the corporate sphere I have not met anyone that has bought a desktop in years – yet I was countered with exactly the same reasons that people will use in the notebook vs laptop debate – screen size, keyboard, cpu, hdd.

My point?  Ahh, yes.  Microsoft better work something out on how to deal with this without making up 1/3 of the cost of a netbook, and without giving users a crippled or deliberately sub-par experience.  With prices this low and margins as thin as they are their traditional business model and price points are going to become less and less tenable.  There is almost a convergence between low-end netbooks and high-end mobile phones – and when was the last time you saw someone willing to splash out £100 extra for an OS for their phone?

Coming up with a solution is their job, not mine (same problem as the RIAA and MPAA), but it’ll be interesting to watch none the less.

* Unless Microsoft were to advertise clearly that the computer they sold you is purposefully crippled so they can sell you the same thing twice.

** Upgraded that to 512mb a day after seeing it.