Q: How do you make the world stop buying so many netbooks?
A: Stop calling them netbooks.
That's the bizarre advice from Microsoft, suggested by one corporate overlord at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei.
His beef? The term "netbook" implies a notebook that is useful only for surfing the net, but since today's mini-notebooks do so much more than just that, the term should be retired.
His suggestion for replacing the term? The exquisitely Microsoftian "low cost small notebook PC."
Semantics in this space are getting increasingly complicated, though whether you call them netbooks, mini-notebooks, smartbooks, or, ahem, low cost small notebook PC, most of these machines do pretty much the same stuff. (The only real difference in this group is the smartbook, a term which is now being used to describe a notebook-type machine that runs a smart phone operating system like Android or, someday, the iPhone OS.)
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