Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7, Continued: Fighting The Last War

The operating system battle is a diverting sideshow, but the real battle is going to be over the next hardware platform. SMBs may not have embraced netbooks yet, but how will they feel about the iTablet?Yesterday we read that, so far anyway, SMBs haven't shown much interest in netbooks: only 14% of respondents in a Spiceworks survey said they planned to purchase one, compared to 70% who planned to buy desktop computers and 61% in the market for standard laptops. It's not likely the netbook numbers will stay that low, however, as usage of cloud services becomes more widespread. Last April Leigh McMullen, a consultant at Sogeti, told bMighty that "the reality is that most workers do e-mail and Web browsing....I would encourage every single bMighty.com reader to think about using netbooks as replacements for full-size laptops."

In addition, new employees will be bringing their platform preferences into the workforce. A recent survey by consumer shopping site Retrevo found that one out of three or their students customers plan to purchase netbooks. By the time you hire them, they'll be used to having connectivity in a small, light package and won't want to give it up.

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So if future workers are embracing netbooks, and bMighty readers should consider netbooks, where does that leave Apple? Well, let's look at what people get netbooks for. In that same April article, Brian Burch, an HP director of SMB marketing, says SMBs mostly don't buy them to replace full-size laptops but rather to provide local, short-term mobility to normally deskbound workers to enale mobile computing in places a full-size notebook might not work. If you search for "reasons to buy a netbook," you'll find more answers, but the bottom line is that people, in business or out, use netbooks to send e-mail, access the Internet, chat, and play multimedia and presentations.

Now let's look at another trend. Between the dominance of those basic functions and the availability of cloud services (Google Docs, Zoho, Salesforce.com, etc.), which operating system is actually running the device is increasingly irrelevant. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington famously wrote, "All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way." He was writing about Google Chrome OS, but he could also have been talking about Phoenix Technologies' HyperSpace, an "instant-on" OS that provides access to basic computer functions (guess which ones).

This is starting to sound like a purpose-built device--a portable "Internet appliance" that gets you connected quickly. Let's see: a portable device with an instant-on operating system that provides Web and e-mail access plus multimedia capabilities -- seems to me Apple already has one of those, and you can make phone calls on it too. I don't want to glibly gloss over the differences between netbooks and smartphones (ably covered by bMighty contributor Paul Korzeniowski). But it seems to me that rather than an assumption that Apple needs to shrink a MacBook to netbook size ignores the alternative: scaling up an iPhone or an iPod Touch to netbook size.

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What we'd have then is the long-rumored Mac tablet. Tablet computers have never really caught on outside a few niche markets; but there's never really been this kind of established market for highly portable online devices. And there have never been this many people already used to touchscreen computing. Paul called netbooks an "interesting development in the laptop space." What if that's all they turn out to be: not the next stage in the computer's evolution, but merely a subspecies? The next stage may be a whole new kind of device -- and if there's one thing Apple has proven to be good at, it's introducing a new kind of device and making people want it.

Apple is uniquely positioned to leapfrog netbooks entirely. To appeal to business people and be more than a novelty, the "iTablet" will need features the iPhone and iPod Touch don't have, such as support for peripherals such as keyboard and monitor. (Though the device would undoubtedly have Bluetooth, and Apple already makes Bluetooth keyboards.) But they managed to squeeze those into a MacBook Air, which is thinner than an iPhone, at least at the thin end. I'm ready to stop worrying about the Apple netbook, and start planning for the first post-netbook computing platform.