Rob Fahey from gamesindustry.biz thinks netbooks are a ‘flash in the pan’.
There is, however, a fairly significant fly in the ointment – or, to pick a more relevant animal metaphor, an elephant on the table. There’s something nobody wants to talk about when the question of netbooks’ shining future is raised, and it’s this – right now, the user experience offered by netbooks is pretty terrible, and perhaps as a result, consumers are obviously much less enthused about the concept than the hardware industry is.
If the user experience is so terrible, then why do users keep buying them? Maybe their definition of user experience is different from Fahey’s?
Netbooks are cheap and small, yes – but they are also extremely cheaply built, with even the most expensive and prestigious netbook devices suffering from flimsy, plastic components.
This is what Mac owners say about PCs.
The small size robs the netbook of the advantage which its low-powered chips should confer, forcing the battery life down to the point where it’s no better than a normal laptop – and often actually worse. Meanwhile, undersized keyboards, small, low-quality screens and poor performance for media playback or complex script-driven websites conspire to create devices whose usability is nothing short of awful.
Awful to whom? To Fahey? Or to the consumer?
Some of those problems may be solved with time. OLED display technology is presently much too expensive to put in cheap netbooks, but when its price falls, it will offer better screens that need less power. Chipset technology improves apace, and even cheap netbook CPUs will eventually be able to handle HD video content without choking. Even the build quality will improve, although this may be at the expense of pricing.
HD video content! Oh, where have we heard this before?
Fahey could be talking about the Wii with these sentences above. Netbooks match a ‘disruptive product’ very well. Will they get better over time? Of course. All disruptive products do. Microsoft, always on the watch for disruption, got the bejesus scared out of them by the arrival of the netbook operating with Linux. They dumped the Windows XP price just to make sure Windows was on these cheap computers. Microsoft isn’t making much money by doing this. But Microsoft takes disruptions seriously.
Herein lies the basic flaw with the dream of the netbook as the “one computer per person” device that will unify the market – that device already exists. In fact, two of those devices already exist – the laptop and the smartphone. In recent years, laptops have grown smaller, lighter, more connected – while smartphones have become more powerful, sprouted bigger screens and better input interfaces, and started talking to the Internet. Netbooks find themselves bridging an increasingly narrow gap in the middle, neither as portable and connected as a smartphone, nor as powerful and useful as a laptop.
This is the wrong way to look at it. It is more like computers are all becoming more mobile now. The era of being anchored to the desktop is gone. There is room for growth in laptops, netbooks, and smartphones. And just because netbooks are a portable computer doesn’t mean they are in the same market as laptops and smartphones. Netbooks have a very different job than laptops and smartphones.
Can gaming succeed on netbooks? The low end market for PC gaming, via the browser or otherwise, has been massively neglected. The “Game Industy” is focusing only on the high end with beefy 3d video cards or the more flash game route. I’ve been looking for quality games that are not free flash garbage and don’t need a huge 3d video card for the longest time.
The best place to find a market is where one everyone says cannot exist. Remember Brain Age or Nintendogs.
