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Read about the author Sudhindra Mokhasi, read his blog, see his tour schedule and events in your city and register for a book event. Write to the author. Read his columns in newspapers and more... |
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Sudhindra's writes a fortnightly column in Deccan Chronicle / Asian Age in the Business - Technomics section. This column 'Tech-Sutra', will appear every alternate Monday starting 15th Jun 2009.
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Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, London
Monday, 29th March 2010
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:: Business / Technomics
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My netbook experiments
29th March 2010
Sudhindra Mokhasi
Around this time last year, I was invited to speak at the national launch of e.go range of notebooks by Wipro. The event was interesting for many reasons.
It was a new product launch in a challenging business environment. Second was its positioning the product was for today's confident and assertive Indians. The international feel to the design and packaging in exotic red, yellow and blue colors, launched by beautiful models on the catwalk was probably a first for this conservative company. The launch of the netbook range was also a first by a major Indian manufacturer.
I had been following the ASUS pioneered Eee PC netbook revolution and bought myself a netbook, more to partake in the experience than with intent of serious usage.
Simplistically, a netbook is a small, low-budget notebook that make compromises (vis-a-vis a full featured notebook) to meet the lower price point but has enough power for commonly used applications.
Netbooks are very lightweight, typically weighing between 1 to 1.5 kgs, have LCD screens around the 10 inch size. Their battery capacity varies between 3.5 hours to 8 hours, in some cases even 10 hours. They usually pack a memory card reader, a decent webcam, built-in Wi-Fi, Ethernet and the usual USB, VGA out slots. The most common pre-installed operating system is Windows XP Home and device comes with 160 GB hard drive and 1 GB (expandable to 2 GB) RAM.
All this at under Rs.20,000 price point.
The netbook family of products is mainly built around Intel's Atom processor and it's supporting chipset. After tepid experimentation with low cost/power Celeron etc., Intel seems to have got this one right, both from a feature and pricing perspective.
One year down the line here's a quick summary of my experiences with the netbook. Because all netbooks share similar characteristics, my comments can apply to the product family from any manufacturer and not my particular model.
The screen seemed very small at first because I was transitioning from a regular sized thinkpad. I found it very irritating to scroll down for almost everything I sometimes still use a bigger external screen at work. The keyboard is cramped, but usable once I got used to the layout.
The processing power is more than adequate for all the basic office activities like emails, spreadsheets and presentations. I never missed an internal DVD drive and used an external one the couple of times I needed it. The device is light and ultra portable and is a pleasure to carry around. In short, this netbook has replaced my notebook as the primary computing device.
But this experience was very thought provoking because I then started pondering about all other instances where we were buying over-engineered stuff. We were recently upgrading the desktop computers in our office.
Since we mainly work on web technology we don't need great computing power on the desktop, and because of security requirements we disable devices like DVD writers and USB ports.
In the normal scheme of things we would have bought a regular dual core branded machine and disabled all the stuff that we didn't need, which is almost everything and the extra processing power would be wasted. Now, we are seriously evaluating nettops Intel Atom based small formfactor CPUs connected to regular desktop monitor.
Acer, ASUS and Lenovo all have Atom powered nettops but designed for home and entertainment use. But I personally believe there are many companies out there who have requirements similar to ours adequate processing power, small form factor, no external data access and economical cost.
An entrepreneurial opportunity!!!!
Sudhindra Mokhasi is CEO of a technology firm and author of ‘BPO-Sutra: True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centers’
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