Interesting idea in Wire today about the BRIC countries and Netbooks ...

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.
The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US—where netbooks are only just taking off—it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they're already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, "I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, 'This is where my next billion customers comes from.' And he was not referring to the US." He meant the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make—Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps?—will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.

FD: Read the whole article on WIRE here...
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks?currentPage=all