Misha

Netbook Sales: Cannibalizing Notebooks or Incremental?

Continuing the thread of using person experience to answer this question, I cannot see how a netbook is anything but a new category. In my family (two working adults and two little kids) we have 3 notebooks. First two are my and my wife’s work notebooks (business models that are a compromise between mobility and performance), plus one of those high-performance 17” entertainment laptops (never leaves home) for girls to play, and for me to use at home for minor work stuff or editing home movies, photos and such. When shopping for a new work notebook last year, I briefly considered a netbook and quickly decided that I may buy one strictly to travel and carry around to make presentations. I could not see how I can even run Adobe Pro without irritation, not to mention problem with running multiple applications and limited real estate to see what I am doing. Relatively poor display quality and its size (becomes more and more important for my aging eyes) is another critical limitation of netbooks. The bottom line for me: I will never consider a netbook as anything other than a mobile device. I will buy it when they become available with DVD players so that I don’t need have DVD player with me when traveling with kids. I can only see netbooks as a poor-man’s notebook replacement (thus some cannibalization). Otherwise, it is a new category, somewhere between smart phones and notebooks.