Daring, Powerful, Persuasive, Excited, Determined and Persistent. All these qualities can pay dividends. In some situations, they can earn you an Ultrabook!

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Back at IDF in Sept we were told that most of Intel’s marketing spend next year will be on Ultrabooks. It seems hard to believe but what is for sure is that there will be a large sum of money involved. Companies producing Ultrabooks (that qualify) can look forward to marketing and advertising help along with a raft of generic Ultrabook advertising. Expect to see the first of this at CES where Intel is bound to be supporting all the Ivy Bridge partners and a big bunch of journalists.

In an interview to be published in the German Handelsblatt newspaper tomorrow, Tom Kilroy, VP of sales and marketing at Intel gives more information. Although the full article is not yet available, a press release (in German) gives selected details.

“Im kommenden Jahr werden die Ultrabooks im Zentrum unserer größten Marketingkampagne seit Jahren stehen”

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This could be seen as an anti-Ultrabook stance (trying to sell standard PCs against the Ultrabook keyword) or preparation for an Ultrabook launch. HP are advertising against searches for ‘Ultrabook’

It looks pro-Ultrabook to me!

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As Sumocat has already pointed out, the results are hardly surprising. If you want to buy a MID in the US, you have to search very hard indeed.

ARS Technica took a list (supplied by Intel Marketing) of MIDs available in the U.S.  and went on a search. The list of device list was hardly complete…

• Archos: 9″ Tablet
• Clarion: MiND
• Fujitsu: U820
• Panasonic: U1 Toughbook, H1 Toughbook
• UMID: m1
• Yukyung Viliv: S5, X70EX

There’s only one place on the internet you’ll find a complete list of all UMPCs and MIDs so it’s easy to find the ones that were missing [Full list below] but that’s not the point of the story. The point of the ARS Technica article is that you can’t find many devices in normal channels. It’s true and it won’t change until distributors get some confidence that they can actually sell stock. This is an incredibly niche market we’re working in here and until better products reach the market with better operating systems and some marketing support from Intel, I don’t think anyone is going to be throwing thousands of dollars at marketing themselves and buying large amounts of stock.

I was speaking to Mobilx today and they have the same worry. There’s no point buying 500 MIDs until you see a no-risk demand that means you can shift stock in a reasonable amount of time. With companies like OQO, Raon Digital and Wibrain going out of business, that risk of being left with a shelf full of products that aren’t going to get marketing or after-sales support is way too high. We agreed that despite Windows XP being useful and productive, XP is boring is becoming a hurdle in the consumer market. That needs to change and that the time is running out. Intel needs to get Moblin/Moorestown products out ASAP because Android, Maemo and ARM have already reached the MID market.

On the bright side, don’t forget that US is not the primary market for MIDs and we’re very close to the main IDF event of the year which means all the news and marketing has already tailed off in preparation for the next wave. In just 6 weeks we should be getting updates on products, platforms and software and with voice-enabled Moorestown and Moblin, it’s a very different proposition this time round.

List of MIDs on next page…

ABI surveyed 1000 people about netbooks. According to their results, only 79% see them as a secondary computer. 11% see them as a primary computer proving that there is a significant overlap an direct impact on notebook sales. No surprise really.

The results are not good news for laptop and netbook manufacturers in general, despite the 79% that are buying a netbooks as a second device. Here are some thoughts from the top of my head.

• Any survey done at the moment is dealing with early-curve consumers that are highly likely to buy a second device. In one year the figures might be worse purely based on the change of customer type (although it will be hard to do this survey in the mainstream market as many consumers may not even know they’ve bought a netbook)
• Even if people buy a netbook as a secondary device, it will change their purchasing rhythm pushing the purchase of a replacement notebook further out. In some cases the netbook may satisfy the customer 100% and the next notebook purchase may never happen.
• As netbooks move to bigger screens, they pull prices of normal laptops down in order to compete on perceived value.

My feeling is that the netbook effect is going to hit manufacturers very hard in the next 3 years. Netbooks aren’t going away though so they will need to find a way to cope with it. This means stripping out niche products, reducing quality and implementing lots of tricky marketing.

More thoughts

ABI Research Survey: 79% of Respondents View Netbooks as “Secondary inch Devices | Press Release | ABI Research.

For someone who quit his job and risked part of the family income on the term ‘UMPC’ its not surprising that I give the occasional thought to whether the ultra mobile PC market will continue to grow! The related meme that started on Friday was an extremely interesting one to follow. It was kicked-off by Gizmodo who asked ‘Subnotebook vs. ultra mobile PC vs. Netbook: WTF Is the Difference?’ Engadget and a number of other websites followed-up.

Looking at all the posts and reviewing all the tags against analytics, trends and search results, it does appear that ‘UMPC’ is now established as a commonly used search term, especially in the last 9 months. In comparison, the terms netbook, subnotebook and mininote appear to be almost background noise and the search results are certainly not clean. MID is a common search term but again, it doesn’t return usable search results. Its future as a marketing tag is questionable although Intel do appear to be putting a lot of weight behind it and it could change quickly. I suspect it will shake out to be a commonly used term before the end of 2008. After scribbling around on paper for a few hours, this is what I ended up with as a simple definition for 2008. [More after the image…]

 
Mobile device segmentation – 2008.

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