Netbook Scoop

The past several months have seen some significant developments in the Ultra Low-cost PC (ULPC) market segment.  As a result, some new trends are emerging.

Asus created this market niche with the introduction of the Eee PC.  For a while, they owned this segment completely, both in market share and mindshare.  MSI’s Wind mini-notebook and Acer’s Aspire One have just begun to ship, so their actual market share is very small.

However, the story is different if you look at mind share.

Here is a chart from Google Trends showing web site volume for “Eee PC”, MSI Wind”, Mini-Note and “Aspire One”.

Asus recently announced that shipments of Eee PCs for the first half of 2008 fell well short of their forecast.  I’m sure that forecast was made in Q4, 2007 when everything was pointing up.

But I’m not sure that the balance of 2008 will see the dramatic increase that they are forecasting.  As you can see, since January, web traffic volume related to the term “eee pc” has been flat.

Contrast that to the buzz created by MSI around their Wind mini-notebook.  Since April, it has taken off. It is now garnering about half the traffic volume that the Eee PC is.  Aspire One has a similar pattern, theirs just starts a little later.

HP got noticed in April with the introduction of the Mini-Note.  But since then, it has steadily faded from mindshare.

Dell created a little blip at then end of May will their Mini-Inspiron.  But it has since completely disappeared.

I believe that the actual market share will follow the mindshare trend.  By year end, both MSI and Acer will own a significant share of the ULPC market segment.  Dell might insert themselves, if they get manage to launch a ULPC product by late summer. HP needs a different horse, the Mini-Note has failed to catch on.

If you combined all of these to create a single chart depicting traffic relating to ULPCs, the overall trend is still climbing at a dramatic pace.  I expect sales in this little segment to just explode over the next 12 months.