Netbooks are small, netbooks are cheap, so why are netbooks being treated like the proverbial “red headed stepson at the family picnic” these days? I am not sure exactly why. If you don’t like them, and don’t want one for yourself, why not just keep quiet about them and let them die a slow death if that is what you think will happen eventually anyway? I think the reasons for all this negative attention may have a couple of underlying causes.

Bigger is better?

The "bigger is always better" category is one such reason. This may also be related to some type of compensation, like bigger trucks, or larger boats, or any one of the multitude of toys that seem to offer some type of indication of the status of the owner. Some people seem to see the size of their laptop as an ego extension, and any thinking that might say that a smaller laptop is more efficient, or might be more suitable to some purposes, is in some way, threatening. Just a note here: don't worry guys, no one is going to force you to buy a little pink netbook!

Comfort zones

It may be that people are afraid that business as usual is no longer business as usual, and that these small computing devices are the wave of the future, a future where most document storage is done at another location online, and the gargantuan drives and the huge batteries needed to run them are becoming a thing of the past. This begins to take power from the hands of institutions to which we have become accustomed, and takes many of us out of our comfort zones.

Those are the causes that look like normal human reactions. I have others in mind, but they are not quite as pleasant, or generous.

In short, it would seem that the only reason for lashing out against these smaller versions of the traditional laptop would be fear. This seems odd, because the people who once took the lead into the laptop versus the desktop, have now become the establishment, just as the desktop versus all other forms of office equipment were before them. The revolution has gone full circle, several times. Each new advancement in any field brings with it some human trepidation. So, netbooks are transitory. So what? What in the fields of computing and electronics is not?

Last night I spent a good bit of time looking over a few pages of the ever controversial John Chow’s blog, particularly his list of the major adsense money makers. Today I went back, hoping to look at the info again, and it had vanished!

After being once banished from the kingdom of Google, and having returned, he seems to have disappeared. Has John Chow  temporarily vanished, or has he been banished?

Is this a temporary thing, or is it another round in the continuing battle between the guru and Google? If anyone knows, please let us know.

Mike McDonald of Web Pro News recently wrote a “grouch piece” about netbooks. It was titled:
“Netbooks: Moving in Right Next Door to Useless”

He offered the same old arguments about how useless these diminutive devices are but nothing really new.

My response was typical of many others, and went something like this:

“Netbooks are not perfect, but they are larger than the tiny little phones, and smaller than the big heavy laptops, and have more battery life. mine reaches a high temp of about 95 degrees, and works pretty well in a pinch. Net books and phones are probably going to meet somewhere in the middle as far as size is concerned, and that suits me just fine, because the phones are already too small to use, and sometimes to small to find! I suspect that no one suspects that they are the last word in this resizing of technology, just a step in that direction, and it is a step that has to be taken, just like automobile technology will someday have something between the tiny motorbikes with four wheels, and the big mobile living rooms we once drove.

When we reach that point, something better will come along, and we will start over. Why do we need netbooks? Because we need the changes they bring.”

There are a lot of other reasons why netbooks are gaining in popularity, their small size is a big draw, as is the battery life, and of course price is a major part of the trend. I got my Dell Inspiron Mini 9, shipping and all for a little over $200.00. Battery life is 4 and a half hours. One of the big draws is, that my system was set up to be Linux based, using “Ubuntu” as it’s operating system, without a hint of Microsoft in the device! It is a great little system!

The truth is, tha Mike McDonald probably has no real issue with netbooks. The piece was probably written as link and traffic bait. The bait seems to have worked gauging by the number of reader responses, and the fact that there are probably about a million blog responses like this one!

To read Mikes original story: Netbooks: Moving in Right Next Door to Useless