You can take this Valleywag story with a huge grain of salt, but, if even only he punchline is true, you can easily see how it can cause problems for the latest and cheapest in computing – the netbook.
The short version is that someone posted nasty comments about the White House Flickr photostream, and Flickr nuked his 1,200 photos. Methinks someone at the White House bitched, and Flickr responded dutifully. But the problem remains that, for whatever reason Flickr acted, they did so without regard for this man’s data.
The promise of the netbook – just enough processing power, data stored in the “cloud” and a cheap price – is tarnished by events like these. I keep all my Flickr photos backed up on two local hard drives for just this reason. I don’t trust the ethics of SoCal companies who run server farms. They have shown time and time again (Google with Chinese censorship? Facebook’s TOS?) that they value expediency over integrity. If you don’t trust banks with your money these days, you sure as hell shouldn’t trust Google or Yahoo with your data.
So, I expect netbooks to flourish during the economic downturn as a cheap access option for Internet services. But, I also fully expect them to morph back into fully-functioning laptops in the coming years as people discover just how unreliable the “cloud” can be.
Update: The chassis are already getting bigger. All we need is a bigger SSD and a peppier processor, and the “netbook” marketing term is dead.
