UnderNetbook: A tale of two markets

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 March 2009 11:04

Opinion and Analysis

Is there really a battle between Windows and Linux to dominate the netbook market, or is it a phoney war that will end in peaceful coexistence?

I had an interesting conversation with Symantec Security Response director David Cole yesterday - one that helped crystallise my own thoughts about netbooks.

We tend to talk about netbooks as if they are largely interchangeable. But there's really two separate things going on under a single banner.

One is the 'traditional' netbook, if that term can be applied to such a recent phenomenon.

The key characteristics are small, light and cheap. All important considerations for something that you might carry everywhere (because smartphones are too expensive and have screens that are too small), or that knocks around at home so you can (for instance) find information on the web while watching TV.

The other is the high-end netbook, which is really just a lightweight notebook. While the lightest and thinnest full-function notebooks have tended to be on the expensive side (the MacBook Air comes to mind), netbooks trim the weight and cost by feature reduction.

So you get an Atom processor rather than a Core 2 Duo, there's no DVD drive (not that all lightweight notebooks include optical storage), and so on.

What operating system does that imply? Please read on.