Some time ago Michael Dell said that netbooks delivers a really poor user experience. Now it’s pretty easy to infer that this is because netbooks sales are starting to erode the higher margins desktop and notebook markets, putting the manifacturers in a really difficult situation: one of the most successful type of device of all timesis killing the most expensive ones.
In the end Michael Dell is even right: as a general purpose pc they deliver a pretty poor user experience for both performance and screen real-estate, but this infortunate situation is in a great extent fault of hardware manifactures.
The first netbook attempt, the old EeePC 701 was pretty much a device on its own: it had an ad hoc user interface and it was clear that it served just a limited set of use cases, casual web browsing, audio/video consumption and things like that. Not entirely different from smartphones use case, but for situations when you can carry around a slightly bigger and more convenient to use device.
Then, seeing the fantastic amount of sales of those thinghies the hardware manifacturers figured out that if they put Windows XP and bigger hard drives on them they would have sold even better and this was totally true, to the point that people only want to buy netbooks instead of regular machines, rather than using them as a secondary companion device (bad economy, the easiest way to still get XP rather the much hated Vista, pick the reason you want).
This has taken away every bit of innovation those devices had, like a different operating syste, solid state drives and software specifically designed for those screen constraints: let’s just throw office on it, it will work perfectly no?
This situation is bad for users that are buying an hammer when they need a screwdriver and bad for vendors that are seeing their profits taken away.
I hope this will be taken as a lesson and manifacturers will learn to fear less to be innovative, rather than taking the path of least resilience. I’m hopeful that devices like the arm based ones, maybe with extensive use of the touch screen will make netbooks that really distincht and innovative class of devices that they deserve to be, rather than just slightly dumber laptops.
Actually, you underestimate the potential of the EEE 701. I purchased one since I needed a modest laptop and I couldn’t afford one of the big ones, and the size was a positive point.
In this EEE, I do coding and testing (GL stuff) and I do most of my activities like in my regular computer, including compiling, browsing, updating repositories, syncing files with my desktop and so…so comparing it to a smartphone is a wild understatement, it’s a full computer capable of doing anything a computer does, including my favorite games.
I changed the default OS to XP though, since it allowed me to have a small game machine, so I didn’t need a dual-boot at my desktop which runs Linux.
And, sincerely, all the “shells” for Linux systems I saw in default installs are pretty bad, at least from an advanced user’s perspective…I don’t know what average users think of them, but I saw no “potential” in the machine with the default shells, it looked like a toy instead. Getting a normal shell into them made them as potent as my desktop in most cases. It’s perfectly understandable they would want Windows, and Linux users can easily get a KDE system running instead with a decent distro…
Innovation is too difficult to make if money is at stake, hence they aim for safety.
Just to mention I made a (quick) french translation of your text at the following URL (same license, obviously). Because it worded much better than I ever managed to do the reason why – IMHO – people are having troubles with netbooks around me.
Feel free to remove that comment once read 🙂
http://dustinthe.net/2009/10/19/netbooksquetes-vous/