Friday night at a Best Buy in Southern California–maybe not the hippest place to be, but some interesting dynamics were at work.
A typical flow of people passed through the laptop section in the 20 minutes I was there. Toward the end, all of the remaining customers (a few men and women, each) were marveling at all the cute, inexpensive laptops. Cute, inexpensive laptops to them, Netbooks to us in the media who like cut-and-dried categories.
I was mildly shocked to see these people ignore the 50 or so standard laptops behind them and focus solely on Netbooks. So, I began querying the sales guy and one of the customers. It came down to essentially two things: price and selection (surprise, surprise). Best Buy now has a large selection of Netbooks–10 or so on display. A far cry from the Best Buy display of six months ago: a single, tiny, neglected Asus Eee PC pushed into a corner.
And I visited a second Best Buy where a sales guy gushed about Netbooks. “They’re extremely popular,” he said, adding that “almost all of my customers” just want to do e-mail and surf the Web. Next >>
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