Airing out the Netbook
The latest report sums up the market momentum of the Netbook as:
"Netbooks are just beginning to gain market traction; about 13 million were sold worldwide in 2008, with 10 million of those sales coming in the second half of the year, global economic crisis notwithstanding, notes Cristiano Laux, Manager of Consulting at Pyramid Research and coauthor of the report. "Bundles of these machines with Internet access are set to become a bread-and-butter offering for operators in developed and emerging markets alike, exceeding sales of notebook computers in the operator channel by 2010," says Laux
."The market for netbooks is dominated by the under 21 demographic most of whom are students. With no set leader set in the Operating System for these devices there is quite a bit of foundation that needs to laid in terms of application development. These worldwide numbers (in their infancy) eclipse those of hardware sales of the iPhone and offer a much larger, richer market for inexpensive application purchases by the owners of these devices.
While the OS could play a pivotal role in the Netbook's capabilities, there are already a number of runtime environments that give you the ability to develop rich applications that mashup existing web services. Adobe AIR along with their beta release of Flash Catalyst brings together an extensive toolkit that allows non-technical rapid development of applications that will shape the real estate of how Netbooks are utilized.
