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There has been a lot of noise of late about what the true role of Netbooks should be. Intel, the creators of both the Netbook friendly Atom chip and the Notebook powering Centrino chip realized that Netbooks were beginning to cannibalize their far more lucrative Notebook market. Therefore, they began declaring publically that Netbooks are good as starter computers or extra machines, but just can’t compare with a full sized notebook when there is work to be done. However, companies like Lenovo and HP are pushing their Netbooks in the marketplace as a business alternative, especially for road warriors looking to shrink their carry-ons.

What does the corporate world have to say about Netbooks, a year after the Eeevolution of Mobile Computing? In a recent article at CIO, Robert Lemos considers if Notebooks will be replaced soon by Netbooks in the corporate sector. The following quote sums up his position quite well…

But that does not mean that Netbooks are ready to take over the enterprise, says Leslie Fiering, research vice president for mobile computing at Gartner. "They are coming in as companion notebooks, as second notebooks, that workers are buying themselves," she says. "The question is whether they are ready to come in as a sanctioned corporate laptop—no."

I know from experience that that is a quite accurate appraisal of the current climate. In my office for example, around 25 employees have Netbooks at this point (out of around 100 employees at that location). All of us use them in addition to larger notebook PCs and bought them for ourselves rather then ordering them through the company. Our IT department requires anti virus software and Windows XP be installed before allowing them on the network, but it did accept them as network machines.

Down the line I definitely see Netbooks being more accepted by the enterprise, much the way that smartphones were slowly adopted by businesses. Even two years ago such things as Blackberrys were only viewed as essential for certain key positions. Now, a smartphone is a pretty standard requirement for most corporate drones. So it will go with Netbooks.

A key indicator of more widespread acceptance to come can be found on today’s college campuses. A friend of mine who manages IT for a small publishing firm (and who owns an Asus Eee 900 himself) said he recently bought his college student son an Eee 1000, as at least half of his classmates are using Netbooks both in class and out as their main computer. As tomorrow’s business executives get used to using Netbooks for basic computing tasks while still in school, they will speed their mainstream enterprise acceptance once they enter the job market.

So is the enterprise Netbook ready? Not yet…but despite what Intel may say, the day is coming when Netbooks will be just another tool used by corporate IT to ensure you can get the job done. It just makes good business-sense.

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).