Jason Per­low has an inter­est­ing arti­cle over on ZDnet about how the eco­nomic cri­sis might spur IT inno­va­tion to save costs. He’s focused mostly on a top-​down, enterprise-​focused “how the heck can we afford this dat­a­cen­ter” per­spec­tive, but it got me think­ing about netbooks.

Before long y’all are going to be as tired as my RL friends of hear­ing about net­books. I’ve recently pur­chased an HP 2133 Mini-​note, and it has com­pletely changed how I approach using a com­puter. I really think these small, cheap, “under-​specced” lap­tops are going to change com­put­ing. And it occurs to me that they might have appeared at a his­tor­i­cally per­fect moment.

The thing about net­books is that they can be so small and cheap pre­cisely because they don’t do as much as a “real” lap­top. Now over time the def­i­n­i­tion of a real lap­top has changed to the point that my writ­ing partner’s 15” lap­top has more power and bet­ter gam­ing per­for­mance than my desk­top, but that’s beside the point. Net­books are good enough to do about 80% of what you’d want to do with a com­puter. They’re great at email, surf­ing, light media (for instance, as I write this in Win­dows Live Writer, I have Out­look and Fire­fox open as well as tunes in Win­dows Media Player; works fine). In other words, they’re the per­fect sec­ond or kid’s PC for most fam­i­lies. As long as you’ve got one big desk­top in the home for the other 20% work, why would you buy any­thing but net­books from then on?

As we slowly stag­ger into the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son, expect to see net­books sales sky­rocket while sales of desk­top and larger lap­tops tapers off.

Eco­nomic cri­sis as a tech­nol­ogy change agent | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com