HP: OK, Netbooks Grabbed More Notebook Market Share Than We Thought They Would
We’ve said more than once that the high volume of netbook sales had to impact the sales numbers for more traditional notebooks. Industry execs have denied that, but that’s beginning to change. Laptop Magazine recently interviewed HP VP Ted Clark about the netbook and notebook markets.
Clark had to admit that netbooks have hit notebooks sales enough to mention:
We do believe that there’s not a huge amount of cannibalization. There is some, maybe a little more than we expected. But overall, we see people buying these products as the second or third PC in the home that they may not have bought prior to having this category to choose from. How many will be satisfied if they do buy these as their primary PC?
Interestingly, Clark gave a glimpse into HP’s expectations that thin clients will make a resurgence due to the growth of cloud computing:
But when you can offload some of that compute power and storage into the cloud, now you’ve got the potential for thin, sleek, larger-screen products that give you a full computing experience but aren’t burdened with a high performance processor and lots of heat and memory. That blurring is going to be driven by the broader trend of cloud computing or thin client computing.
It seems like the further we advance the farther back we regress. :)
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… and, netbook is not that slow as many blindly assume or claim. I have used a Macbook exclusively for a week. I brought Eee 1000h to Starbucks today and it actually felt faster than Macbook. Granted all I ran on it was Firefox and MS office 2007, but those two take 90% of my computer usage anyway.
I actually agree with Clark’s complete statement on the matter… most are buying them as 2nd/3rd computers for some specialized use. Personally, I still don’t know anyone I work or talk to regularly that has one, and most have never heard the distinction of the name… then again, they’re the same group of people who are absolutely fascinated with my HP Elitebook 2730p at work, lol.