the onda

Five years ago I fell in love with Neil Stephenson's "primer," the intelligent tablet/book/PC, part AI, part nano-technology, part information access device, and most importantly the star of his novel "The Diamond Age." In the days before the OLPC I remember writing a blog post about how a $500 laptop with a net connection could get us there in most of the developing world, thinking all the while that $500 seemed like a Crazy Eddie Low Price for a laptop, and in fact one which we might not achieve without some kind of subsidy.

Looking at the booming "netbook" category these days, it's almost hard to believe what is going on. What Asus pioneered just over a year ago with its EeePC (a flash-based subnotebook at $400) has been copied by vendors big and small to the point where $500 for a top-brand laptop seems like too much. With HP and Dell churning these guys out inside of their hyper-efficient supply chains, it is just a matter of time before we truly see the $100 laptop become a reality.

In the meantime, another very interesting thing is happening: the OS on these machines is finally being reduced to just a "buggy bunch of device drivers" (in some cases literally) with the web browser being the main event. The netbooks are becoming the physical representation of the web browser (much like the iPhone has) and in the process they are changing the expectation for what portable computing is all about: from performance and features to battery life and connectivity.

The first game changer in the netbook category was abandoning hard drives for flash and being willing to use 8 and 9-inch displays in order to boost robustness and get the cost down. The next discontinuous move will come from the first hardware manufacturer that bundles in a subsidized 3G data connection (a la Kindle) by cutting a deal with either Google or Microsoft for advertising and desktop search. Free access would change the personal computer forever, but even Peek-like contractless $20/month would put a significant dent in today's market for laptops and smartphones.