Mannerisms

The issues are: Will Netbooks kill laptops? And: Will Intel and Microsoft be eliminated from the Netbook market?

Netbook sales in the first three months of 2009 totalled 5.5 million. Expectations are that the Netbook market will grow by 80% in 2009. Laptop sales are expected to grow 3% this year.

PC market analyst Display Search expects Q2 sales of Netbooks to top 9 million units which is a 50% increase over Q1. Display Search is expecting 30 million unit sales this year and predicts Netbooks will represent nearly a quarter of all notebook PCs sold this year.

ARM's CEO, Warren East, reckons the Netbook market will be a 30 million market next year with ARM-based chips in 6 million of them.

Gartner predicts that, by 2012, annual Netbook sales will be over 50 million.

So the answer to Question 1 looks like: Yes.

But then Intel is saying that Netbooks can't do heavy duty stuff like graphics.

But, at Computex, Adobe announced that it was working with Broadcom and Nvidia to optimise Flash for their chips.

With Broadcom, Adobe will  produce a version of Flash optimised for Broadcom's Crystal HD video accelerators used in Netbooks - work which is expected to be completed in the first half of 2010.

With Nvidia, Adobe will be optimising Flash for all of Nvidia's graphics processors, including Nvidia's Atom-rival device - Tegra.

The Nvidia and Broadcom projects will bring H.264 high-definition video to portable web-browsing devices, said Adobe.

So, will Microsoft be making a play to get into the Netbook sector which could wipe out laptops which are the most profitable segment of the PC market?

At Computex, Steve Guggenheimer, boss of Microsoft's OEM division, said Microsoft wouldn't be producing an O/S optimised for Netbooks.

Asked if Linux could do as good a job in a Netbook as Microsoft XP, ARM's East replies: "Today the Linux world is not as good as Microsoft from the point of view of the user, but it's getting rapidly better. So it will get to be as good as Microsoft and, when that happens, the genie will be out of the bottle. Because Linux is much more cost-effective than Microsoft, people will ask: 'Why do we use Microsoft?'"

Intel's purchase of Wind River last week is undoubtedly aimed at getting Linux to run better on x86 processors than it does on other microprocessors. 

So the Wind River acquisition is both a massive act of infidelity by one Wintel partner to the other, and an opportunity to de-emphasise Wind River's Linux development work on non-x86 platforms which currently accounts for 70 per cent of Wind River's business.

The Litmus Test, of course, is what are the Netbook manufacturers doing? Asus, which kick-started the Netbook market with its Eee, is using the Qualcomm ARM-based Snapdragon chip-set for its latest Android-based Eee which is planned to launch this year.

And an interesting turnaround is that Acer will put an Android O/S alongside XP in a notebook to be launched this year. Shades of the original IBM PC which came out with alternative Oses - PC-DOS and CP/M.

And then Dell and HP are said to be looking at putting Android in a PC. Intel has seen the writing on the wall and it spells Linux.

Of course there are other big  questions for Intel: 

Will Atom be cut out of  future Netbook design-ins by Intel's hitherto inability to make Netbook chip-sets as low power as ARM-based chip-sets?

and

Will Atom's progress be hampered by Intel's historic inability to succeed in markets where it has competition?

So the answer to Question 2 is: Could be.