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Lenovo On the Future of the Netbook
thefickler touts an interview in tech.blorge with Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst, Matt Kohut, who spoke about his vision of the future of netbooks, which involves Windows 7, bigger screens, built-in 3G, touch integration, and lower prices. Linux fans will be disappointed to hear that Kohut thinks Windows 7 will dominate future generations of netbooks because it offers a better, more familiar solution, with the benefits of touch. Quoting Kohut: "The other challenge has been, in order to keep the price points down, a lot of people thought that Linux would be the savior of all of these netbooks. You know, there were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves $50 or $100 or whatever it happens to be, based on Microsoft's pricing and, again, from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns because people didn't know what to do with it. Linux, even if you've got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows. So, we've seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and it's ready to go."
Uhhh because screens never become more power efficent and battery technology becomes weaker over time?
Seriously though, your post doesn't make any sense because new materials which are stronger/lighter/cheaper, screens are consuming less power(LCDs) and batteries are becoming more powerful and longer lasting (6+cells).
Also bigger screens for touchpads is an obvious 'duhhhh', doesn't mean everyone is going to get a big screen.
I guess the reason why I'd never switched to Linux is because of shit like this? It's too tiring to have to fight against the lack of commercial and vendor support - very few businesses have any faith in it for the desktop. This means I continually hesitate if I'm going to be buying a car navigation unit, phone, web cam or any other peripheral because I will be expecting it NOT to work in Linux. If it somehow does, it generally is only after a lot of work googling and running weird scripts in a terminal.
eg. Eever tried synching a Blackberry in Linux? In Windows it's easy - install the BlackBerry Desktop Software and away you go. In Linux, or Ubuntu at least, you have to follow all this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190938 . Yeah, really gonna happen for the non-geek end user. It's true that this is entirely the vendor's fault for not supporting Linux, but the problem is that for the hardware people WANT to use, very few do. So what would most people do, go without? Shit no, they'll run Windows and alieviate the stress and hardship.
THAT'S why even on a netbook, Linux will always come second-best.