Netbooks have rapidly gained in popularity over the past few years, finding their way into the hands of business professionals who want a small notebook for travel purposes, and budget consumers who only have a few hundred dollars to spend on a new computer. Now that we’ve all become accustomed to calling them netbooks, Microsoft has suggested that our tine new friends need a new name all together.
According to a report in Digitimes, Microsoft wants netbooks to now be referred to as “low cost small notebook PCs.” The idea behind the name change is that netbooks are now capable of doing much more than simply surfing the web, and that web surfing was where the term “netbook” came from in the first place.
Many industry professionals think the reasoning behind the name change is so that Microsoft can offer several different versions of Windows 7 without facing scrutiny from consumers. According to Digitimes: ” Some market watchers speculated that the renaming strategy will help Microsoft separate the mini-notebooks with regular notebook capabilities from netbooks, so that it can reduce the number of its low-end Windows shipments. The new definition will require mid-range to high-end mini-notebooks, which may fall into the netbook category because of their size, to adopt higher-end versions of Windows 7, added the market watchers.”
More details are expected to come out in a keynote speech from the company later today at Computex.
What do you think about the name change? While it is true that netbooks do a lot more than simply surf the web now, the consumer market has just become accustomed to knowing what a netbook even is-changing the name seems somewhat ridiculous, and will inevitably confuse the consumer market more than it will help.
What would you rather buy: A netbook, or a low cost small notebook PC?
