There’s no doubt that netbooks have been wildly successful. Ultraportable laptops in the 11″ and below range have always done fairly well in Asia, even before the netbooks came along, but the netbooks have been more successful in other parts of the world than many expected (especially given how many have sold in such a short amount of time).
Online retailers such as Amazon have netbook sections at their US and UK stores (and in fact, netbooks dominate the top sellers’ list at Amazon.com (US) and aren’t doing too shabby at Amazon.co.uk (UK)).
There’s been discussion over the lack of success that smaller form factors have had in some of these areas (the Ultra Mobile PCs – UMPCs), as well as Tablet PCs (although I would argue that with HP and others dropping the price over the past few years, such as the HP Pavilion tx2500z series).
Iyaz Akhtar and Robert Nelson over at gadgetell has come up with five reasons why the netbooks have succeeded:
– Form Factor
– Price
– Simplicity
– Time
– Microsoft
I would say the most important out of those five would be price followed by timing, but read the link below for a great analysis – Akhtar and Nelson have really narrowed down the success of the netbook. It’s basically a “perfect storm” of factors for the small laptops / sub-notebooks to have come into their own.
Read: Gadgetell