Netbooks are those cute little laptops that we’ve come to love so much. We must because we’re buying them in record numbers and everybody is entering the market, except Apple. One thing we say often about netbooks is that they meet the needs of a lot of different user types. They are wonderful travel companions due to their small and light footprint, they can do email and web stuff well and they are fairly capable devices for a laptop so cheap. This leads to the question- would netbooks survive in the enterprise?
I had an interesting conversation with someone in the industry who is in a position to know about such things. He’s asked me to not divulge his identity nor who he works for as it’s not something they want up for public discussion. Something was stated in this conversation that surprised me- enterprise customers are pushing OEMs to produce netbooks for them. The reasoning is given that netbooks can do the bulk of what the enterprises need their workers to do and given the low cost compared to alternatives they seriously want to bring netbooks in the door.
This is not something that we’d normally expect to hear as netbooks are aimed at the “casual” computer user who needs a companion device for the home. Road warriors have been vocal about the benefits of netbooks while on the road so perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that savvy enterprises realize they meet the needs of some of their workers. I would imagine that the appeal of a cheap laptop for their workers who travel a lot might be growing as they see netbooks that have a lot of capability inside.
So what kind of netbook do you think would appeal to the enterprise market? Is Windows XP good enough for the enterprise? Truth is it’s probably preferred over Vista since many enterprises have refused to upgrade to Vista internally. Would the enterprise netbook need gobs of memory, faster processors, what? It’s important to remember that adding capabilities to netbooks always results in higher cost and that’s probably not a good thing, although the enterprise might be willing to bear that extra cost. Corporate netbooks would likely still be cheaper than the full-blown laptops they are buying now so who knows? We’re interested in your thoughts on the prospect of an enterprise netbook, especially if you work in such an environment.
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