The Attack of the Ultra-Mobile PCs
The website Engadget had an interesting observation last week - nine of the top ten best-selling laptops on Amazon.com are ultra-mobile PCs. (This is true as of 9:12 a.m. on September 30, 2008. Who knows what this link will show in the future?) As a matter of fact, at the time of this posting, most of the top 25 computers are UMPCs of one form or another.
This further underscores why technology planning and the standards that grow out of them have to remain flexible. This market niche didn’t exist twelve months ago, and even when the initial devices came to market and sold well, many technology observers openly derided them as under-powered and over-priced. And yet, here we are eleven months after the Asus EEEPC came to market, and that brand has six of the top twelve best-selling laptops at Amazon.
Standards are important to making things work smoothly, but the concept of standards assumes a level of stability and predictablility. That works for awhile in technology, but eventually there is a disruption and your standards need to be reconsidered. I think the rise of the UMPCs is going to be one of those disruptions.