Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.
But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

That's how Windows Vista was born...
My great hope is that, after changing the hardware industry, the netbook revolution will change the software industry by forcing software companies to finally take care of what users want. If you ever used Windows Vista, you probably have a lot of examples of things that happened and that you didn't really want. But still you needed to change your machine to have the newest microsoft operating system because it needs at least 1Go of RAM. So you bought a new machine, and you got disappointed. Familiar, huh? And Microsoft is not the only example. Later in the article, Clive Thompson gave an example of his use of Photoshop. Who honestly use more than 10% of Photoshop functionalities except professionals? Nobody. So why can't Adobe make a simpler interface, lighter software? They will have to, if they want to stay competitive regarding online image-editing solutions. After all, the netbook might have created a twist in users' choice, people start to think by themselves and stop listening to marketers and I think it is amazing. But PC makers probably don't agree...

The great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy"—the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it's also possible that the next time you're replacing an aging laptop, you'll walk into the store and wonder, "Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?" And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

Companies with real leverage are not anymore the ones that make products desirable but the ones that make desirable products (not true for Apple though). Most of things that most people do is online now.

Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says.

Promising...