Is the netbook dead already? So soon? Netbook we hardly knew you! Lenovo chief operating officer Rory Read has no doubts over the netbook’s demise. “Netbooks are pretty much over,” he told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview last month. As one who never really joined the netbook fad, I’m pretty sure Read is right.
It always seemed to me that the netbook’s limitations were pretty obvious. When Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and Apple COO Tim Cook are united in their opposition to something, it doesn’t hurt to listen to what they have to say. Back in October 2009, Dell suggested notebook users would become disillusioned with the netbook form factor pretty quickly because the screen was small and performance was lower.
His criticism came six months after Cook told analysts that netbooks had “cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens. It’s just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on. It’s a segment we would not choose to play in.”
Those comments didn’t stop netbooks from enjoying pretty spectacular growth in the early days. Intel CEO Paul Otellini was a keen supporter, remarking at IDF around the same time as Dell made his comments that the netbook market had been “quite astounding”, had outpaced the iPhone and Wii and there was “no looking back.”
Except, to a certain extent Otellini was already looking back. Six months later, Apple launched the iPad, resurrecting the tablet format in the process. With three million units sold in the first 80 days, all bets were off as far as the netbook was concerned. You could almost hear the PC market tanker shuddering to a halt and the horrible grinding sound of the ship’s helm being brought about.
After the usual deluge of disparaging remarks from many in the IT world that the iPad was underpowered, expensive and didn’t have enough ports (many accusations that were thrown at the iPod and iPhone in their turn), the mainstream market did what it always does and starting looking for ways to produce their own facsimiles of the Apple template.
Netbooks still exist but how often do we hear about them nowadays? It’s a measure of the iPad’s success that netbooks became yesterday’s news almost overnight. Instead, every vendor and his OEM jumped on the tablet bandwagon. Consumer trade shows were awash with prototypes, working demos and mock-ups of prospective tablets that were only a few months away, if not imminent. Motorola’s Xoom was an early favourite. Android was going to wipe the floor with Apple’s iOS as more and more tablet devices came to market, not forgetting those based on Windows.
To date, things have refused to go quite to plan. The Xoom’s sales have not set the world alight and last month Acer reduced sales forecasts for its tablet devices in 2010 by 60%. They may well win through ultimately but it’s not going to be an overnight phenomenon.
It’s illuminating that Read’s comments about netbooks to Dow Jones Newswire came as he confirmed the PC marker planned to launch two 10-inch Android tablets in the summer and a Windows-based version later in the year. On the one hand, you could say it suits Lenovo’s plans to downplay the netbook’s future when it’s preparing to enter the tablet market and bandying around predictions that tablets will account for 15% of the PC market in the next three years or so. But you could equally argue that Lenovo is making a decision based on the way the market is going rather than the way it has gone.
Whatever you might think about Apple’s platform, business model and technology, it’s quite an achievement for one company to have so successfully acted as a massively disruptive agent in three markets (Mp3 player, smartphone and tablet) in the last ten years or so. And the irony is that by choosing to enter the tablet market rather than the netbook arena, Apple may well have helped to kill off the netbook. This suggests something else about its disruptive influence on technology: that it helps to make it better by forcing vendors to produce stronger products.
Ltd
