Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:

There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass.  I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.

I am going to go on record here and claim that 2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook.  I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7.  I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM.

While there have been scores of articles breathlessly extolling the coming panacea brought to you by Netbooks, I am calling bullshit, and in fact going to make the claim that the Netbooks will suffer the same fate as the Razor scooter.  In fact, for the true nerds, let’s do a cast:

netbook = (2009)razorscooter;

For those of you too young to remember when the Razor first came on the hipster scene, it was back in the late 90s, and could easily be used as a sign of dot com excess.  Everyone, it seemed, had one of these things, and yet no one, it seemed, was actually riding them.  People carried them around, or you had them in offices (for what purpose I don’t know, but I do know I was scooting to a meeting for which I was late when I saw my future wife sitting in the lobby of my dot com job).  Everyone had to have one of these things.  Then, just as quickly as they appeared, they largely disappeared from that scene.  Sure, you still see them around, and they are certainly for sale, but there’s no flash there.  The cool factor was gone once the lack of utility settled in.

The same fate awaits the netbook.  Let’s start with the issues.  I don’t care what people say about the use cases, the screen resolution for me, is the single biggest limiting factor for netbooks.  I suppose you can blame Microsoft and the new Ribbon UI element, but screen real estate is at a super premium on these netbooks.  I found that there were Flash ads which were designed to be 600 pixels high, and because of toolbars and what not in my browser, the “close window” text for the ad was below the fold, and the ad scrolled with the page.  Ugh!

Second, the Atom processor is not a suitable option for productivity software.  If you do anything remotely resembling serious browsing (more than a few tabs open) or have Outlook + a large PST file, forget about bringing your computer out from sleepy time.  Anytime I opened my machine and Outlook went to synch, the pain and suffering was acute.  Even worse if you hadn’t opened the machine for a day or so and had a bunch of meeting reminders pop up.  I also found that if I had 2 Office apps open, the context switching was sometimes painful.

Lastly, and this is the one that really irks me, the battery life was awful.  For such a small machine, and wimpy processor, the default battery would last 2 hours at most.  Not even enough for 2 meetings without having to travel with the power brick.  I borrowed someone’s 6 cell battery, and that made it marginally more tolerable.  When you think about how long a batter on the new MacBook Pro 13” lasts, the 2 pound trade off for the MBP is well worth the extra 5 hours of battery life.  Plus the bigger screen.  Yes, it’s more expensive, but I think the $300 price point isn’t going to be enough once people use these machines more and more, and come to realize their many shortcomings.

Ultimately I believe people was smaller/lighter form factors, but will grow tired of the toy factor.  You can get a decent laptop for $600.  I am not sure what market space the netbook ultimately occupies.

I cannot even begin to understand the logic of this design decision.  When I got to my room at the Venetian, I was surprised by a couple of things.  First was the size.  It’s a business suite.  Second, the fact that the bed pulled out of the wall…in the corner.  That was a little off putting.  However, the clock is what made me angry.

The clock wasn’t plugged in, so that was the first order of business.  I tried for 10-15 minutes to figure out how to set it.  Being an engineer, I simply couldn’t admit defeat.  Ultimately, I was tired and called the front desk.  It turns out that this particular clock needs a screwdriver (a SCREWDRIVER) to set the time. You can set the alarm fine, but in order to set the time, you need to remove the bottom of the box.  WTF?  They offered to send up an engineer to set it, but knowing what  “truck roll” would cost, I couldn’t, in good conscience, do that.  I opted for the wake up call.

Wow.

I’ve been thinking about business models quite a bit lately.  Mostly because of the work I am doing on cloud services.  In fact, many of the conversations I have been having at our Worldwide Partner Conference over the last few days have specifically focused on cloud compute business models.  I am going to put this out there, and let the VCs be damned.  There’s a reason that “free” and “fail” both start with “f” and have four letters.  “Free” is my new four letter word.  A business model that is based on free is frail and bound to fail.

At some point, the tyranny of the free has to go away.  Mashable had a similar article just the other day.  37Signals hammers on this point constantly.  It’s real simple, as far as I am concerned.  Make something, sell it, make more, and then sell more.  It’s a nice virtuous cycle.  I have lost count of the number of partners with whom I have met this week who have multiple millions of dollars in revenue attached to coding (ISVs or custom application development).  Selling ads against your app requires scale.  Scale comes to a very small number of apps.  There’s a ton of software left to be written that will never be used by enough people to be ad supported.

I want to offer the following: The free movement is completely wrong minded.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  The company I just sold has software+services that are completely free.  In just 14 months, we signed up 150K users, but the app didn’t have an engagement model that supported high numbers of page views.  We listened to one very loud board member who insisted that we be free and never charged for the product.  In the end, we sold the company (for a good result), but we were on fumes.  Developers need to be paid, and they don’t accept page views.  Had we started charging from the outset, I suspect we would not have sold so soon.

In the next few weeks, I plan to have some posts on the business models that are out there and what probably makes sense around cloud compute, but we, as an industry, have to refocus on solving real problems, and charging money for those things.  The penny-gap is getting harder and harder to cross with so much downward pressure on pricing from people who are willing to give stuff away for free.