DigiTimes reports that Steven Guggenheimer, General Manager of the Application Platform & Development Marketing Division at Microsoft, plans to re-brand “netbooks” as “low cost small notebook PCs”.
Guggenheimer pointed out on June 2 in Taipei during Computex 2009 that since some of the mini-notebooks already feature capabilities more than just purely Internet browsing – which is the main purpose of the netbook – therefore the term netbook should be abandoned.
Yeah, I get the point, but trying to execute a market strategy on corporate semantics is incredibly pedantic. The chances of “low cost small notebook PC” unseating “netbook” in consumers’ minds is exactly zero.