

How netbooks died the death of a thousand cuts - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/176841/who-killed-netbook

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th0ma5
This article mentions nothing about the whisper campaign that essentially
touted them as not being Windows compatible, so ones with regular harddrives
came out, and the price became the same as a regular notebook.

I remember going to Microcenter to pick up an EEE and they pretty much, even
though I specifically asked for it, prevented me from buying one. They did the
following:

1\. Said "Oh you don't want that, it doesn't run Windows" (I said that's fine,
I run linux)

2\. Then they said "well, we don't know the price, but we think it is $699"
...... it should've been like $300 or so.

3\. Then they said they didn't have any, and wouldn't sell me the display
model.

The margins may well have been able to improve with scale, but I'm fairly
convinced that a subtle market manipulation was perpetrated by someone
somewhere because truly affordable technology pops the bubble.

------
edw
A bit of a meta-comment: This article is so poorly edited and — as a result —
so overly long that it makes me wonder if _IT World_ encourages its writers to
blather on for pages in order to gin up page views. In my case, it didn't
quite work out, as I stopped reading about halfway down the third page and
left, making a mental note not to bother reading articles on _IT World_.

~~~
zwieback
Yes, it's a very poorly written and edited article. Unfortunately, I kept
reading because it seemed there would be something interesting on the last
page. There isn't.

