Netbooks: Weapons of Mass Desolation?

Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry
Article from NYTimes, courtesy of Engadget.

This is a classic call for a Waambulance. Consumers want cheaper laptops, and manufacturers are unhappy because this eats their profit margins.

There's not much to say here. The way I see it, there's 2 scenarios at work:

1) Consumers want netbooks as a second lightweight machine
Manufacturers still get to keep their share of the first-machine pie.

2) Consumers are using netbooks as their primary machine
If that's the case, then maybe we've reached the point where ultralights provide enough computing power to meet the needs of the large majority of users. Then perhaps it's time manufacturers started to look at their business and at the market, and move accordingly instead of sitting on their asses and whining.

Despite the relatively high price of the Asus EEE 900 series, people are still snapping it up. There's money to be made out there, if you can't figure out how to, that's your problem.

I'm a self-professed Fujitsu fanboy, I like the tablet PCs they make and my siblings don't seem to have any issue with their Fujitsu laptops. But it disappoints me to see them profess worry over netbooks. At the kind of retail prices their machines sell at, the low-budget consumer was never in their target market anyway. They can sell their machines much cheaper, and I think they know it but are not willing to 'fess up. I think they've been lazy long enough, and I hope to either see them do more with their business, or drop prices.