New ways to ride the netbook wave
Despite the current economics, netbook sales have been growing at double-digit rates. It's one of the few hot spots in the consumer computing space. There are now more than 50 vendors with an offering across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
What's really interesting is the shift toward the importance of the telco channel in accelerating netbooks sales. The decreasing price point of netbooks, while not necessarily exciting the hardware manufacturers, is enabling new ecosystems and use-cases, and it's facilitating a value-system shift from the hardware to the newly enabled ecosystems.
In Europe, for example, this shift has been toward wireless data service providers, in much the same way that inexpensive handsets enabled wireless voice services. But there are many other exciting possibilities in after-market sales, with decreasingly expensive devices. According to IDC, "mini-notebooks will continue to shake the industry from both a go-to-market and a pricing perspective".
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