Why Netbooks Are the Paring Knives of the Technology World

[Commentary] The brilliance of netbooks is that computer makers learned how to distill the device down to a few really important things that it does really well. For less than half the price of PC, you get the well designed "paring knife" of the PC world -- a high-functioning, low-stress, low-maintenance marvel. Once you think about them as an easy access web-browsing device, you start to imagine a host of new services around communications and connectivity. Netbooks are perfect for incorporating the new thinking around unified digital communications, a la Google Wave. Or, there could be new types of services that broadcast personalized interactive Internet channels (the built-in web cam makes this fun). There can even be new advertising models or new content-consumption models. If one extends this model further, one can even think of netbooks as the iPods of the PC world.