the onda

Om has a great piece on how Apple is for sure making a netbook that won't be like the Fischer-Price toys that vendors small and big are characterizing as the brightspot of the PC industry in 2008 (8 million units last year and expected to grow quickly).

His piece reminded me of having owned a Rio PMP500 way back before the iPod. It was amazing to replace the walkman I was using in much the same way that it is amazing to replace a Windows Vista luggable computer with a svelte laptop that just emanates portability. But as soon as you start using it for real you realize that the limitations far exceed the cool factor and quickly learn to supplement the device with a more traditional big sibling (in my case, I was doing a lot of cross continental travel and the PMP500 would only get me about an hour of music so I carried a Discman as well).

We are so desperate for volume in the PC industry during this global meltdown that we're not clearly applying the "bozo test" to this new segment (the bozo test states that only a bozo would back the business plan). In my case, I've now owned and tried to push 3 netbooks (if you count the OLPC) on my family only to have them prefer the iTouch form factor for most of the common computing activities.

More significantly, this weekend I went for a walk in Harvard Square, a fairly urban area full of students and young professionals alike, in search of spotting netbooks in the wild. The final tally: out of about 25 computers (and about the same number of smartphones), I spotted one Asus EeePC. I did however notice that about 35% of the laptops I saw were some form of MacBook (especially popular at Peet's), and more surprisingly still, plenty of iPhones. I even noticed one young woman waving an iPod touch around like a magic wand, trying to cast a spell to conjure some Internet.

Clearly this isn't a super empirical study but I'd love to see return rates on netbooks when they are purchased as primary computers. In the meanwhile, it is good news that Apple is trying to reinvent this category because once they do, there will be all sorts of vendors who will be fast followers and drive ubiquity for whatever that tweener formfactor ends up looking like. Unlike the MP3 case, there is no portable computer vendor that is asleep at the wheel on this transition to the second high volume post-PC device.