I was paging through my RSS reader this afternoon, and came across a post from the normally quite reasonable Mike Elgan at his “raw feed” entitled: Is the Netbook Dead? Ha! It Never Existed!

In it, he says:

2008 was the "Year of the Netbook." It’s only 2009, and already pundits are pronouncing the netbook dead.

Last year, netbooks were the hottest topic in tech. Today, new netbook introductions are met with a resounding yawn. Nobody cares about netbooks anymore. But is the netbook really "dead"?

The truth is that the netbook never really existed. I’m sorry, but it’s true. There’s no such thing as a netbook. But there will be. Next year. They’re called smartbooks. You’ve gotta read this.

The whole post is just a pointer to a longer article by Mike over at Internet.com’s Datamation blog, which I’ll delve into in just a moment.  Before I do that, what really caught my attention was the assertion that netbooks are ‘dead.’

Excuse me?  Have you had a gander at your webstats lately?  Netbooks are very much the zeitgeist. We’ve only written about netbooks maybe three or four times in depth here at SiliconANGLE, but it’s in our top five keywords for search engine traffic here.  For those who write about that sort of tech more regularly, it’s even hotter. I recently got a peek at the leading SEO keywords for GigaOm’s blog, and Netbook was the number two keyword.

OK, I Get It. Netbooks are Still Hot.  So?

In his Datamation blog post, Mike Elgan goes on to downplay the significance of what caused netbooks to rise to prominence:

Pundits (not me — those other pundits) will tell you that a combination of small size, low price, weak processor and non-standard operating system conspire to differentiate a netbook from a laptop.

But now that the whole netbook thing has played out, we can see that none of those elements differentiates. The truth is that netbooks are nothing more than tiny laptops.

Yes, they’re cheap. But they were only slightly ahead of the Moore’s Law pricing trajectory that normal-size laptops were on. Now you can buy 15- or 17-inch laptops for less than $450. Sure, you can buy a netbook for less than that, but you can also buy one for more. Pricing overlaps. Netbook and laptop pricing is a matter of degree, not kind.

Let’s be honest. Cheapness was the single factor that jolted the so-called netbook category into the stratosphere. If full-size laptops were as cheap in late 2007 and early 2008 as they are today, laptops would have sold just as well — or better.

In his rush to publish a contrarian opinion, Elgan has somehow confused the chicken with the egg. He mentions Moore’s Law and the fact that if laptops were the same price as netbooks two years ago, then it would be laptops that had meteoric rise in popularity, not the netbooks.

This fundamentally ignores how netbooks came about in the first place – when netbooks were being marketed, it was the first time in modern history where a computer running hardware, software and an OS several generations old could keep up with modern computing devices for what the bulk of the mainstream wanted a computer for: surfing the web.

Forget about the terms netbook and laptop for a minute – what we’re talking about has nothing to do with being ahead of Moore’s law – it has to do with the fact that Moore’s Law has pushed computing speeds ahead of the needs of software developers.  In other words, first generation computing devices have too much power for the average user to fully utilize.

Simply put: the sheer power of computers as much as six years old right now are far more useful than top of the line computers were for the previous decade.

So call the next iteration of previous-generation computing devices smartbooks, netbooks, palmtops or whatever other clever marketing term you can imagine – the phenomenon will continue to exist for quite some time.