Who's Buying Tiny Little Netbooks?

There seems to be a lot of excitement about stripped-down, cheap "netbooks" like the eeePC. But who's actually buying them? Not much of anybody yet.

Bill Hughes at In-Stat just finished a survey of technology consumers, and he shared the results with me. Out of 1,749 respondents, only 23 had bought a netbook. That's 1.3% -- or basically a rounding error. The netbook buyers almost all were a category of tech consumer Hughes calls "beasts of burden" -- the kind of people who buy multiple tech toys and carry them around. In other words, they are absolutely NOT the general market. They're crazy early adopters who will buy anything.

That doesn't mean the netbooks aren't going anywhere. It just means it's hard to know whether the excitement is significant. As Hughes says: "An extreme analogy is that a local independent coffee shop may be doing great and have long lines, but it appears to be small when compared to the overall market for coffee shops."

These devices, typified by Asus' eeePC, cost about $300 and are geared toward working on the Internet rather than running heavy software like Microsoft Office. Intel is particularly big on the devices and is supplying a chip, called the Atom processor, that's making many of these gadgets possible.

Eventually, I think these little guys will be desired as second computers, much as families came to want second cars in the 1960s and '70s. Once you've got built-in WiMax and little key drives that can hold 10 gigs, you'd easily be able to leave the heavy-duty laptop on your desk and take a netbook traveling or to a meeting. Netbooks might be a tiny statistical slice now, but that's probably going to change.