? (0xe2.0x9a.0x9b@gmail.com) on 9/19/09 wrote:
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>In addition, the competing company would need a non-trivial amount of money for advertising.

Which the people who would actually make such things, i.e. ARM partners and their customers, do have.

>I think you pointed to the basic problem that is here: the software side. I cannot
>imagine how it would be possible to fully explain to the *masses* that they cannot
>run Word/Excel/VisualStudio/games/etc on an ARM netbook.

So what? They understand that they don't run on something like an iPhone or a N900. Have you ever seen a non techie use a netbook? They use it as a terminal and mostly run a web browser on it. The key is not to market the device as a computer.

Also 1% of a very big market is not to be sniffed at. For example Apple has ~1% of the phone market in most countries it's operating in and shipped ~7 million units last quarter. The current Netbook market is smaller but it's still quite large.

Microsoft have been very successfully in instilling in everyone's mind that a Netbook is just a reduced sized laptop and must run Windows regardless of if the user actually needs to run anything Windows specific.

However if you look at Windows 7 the bottom two SKUs are so crippled that you have to go up to "Home Premium" before you even get such things as multitouch. This adds a large amount to the cost of the unit making it unattractive to the target market.

>facts, what would be your estimate of the potential market share of an x86-INcompatible processor?

Much bigger.

Firstly the companies involved are larger and sounder financially than both AMD and VIA and secondly they aren't in the the x86 market so don't have to pad around trying not to annoy Intel and living with the constant risk of Intel trying to stop them producing x86 chips at all.

Secondly the Nano isn't competitive in terms of power, it has a TDP of 5W for the least hungry Nano U2300.

>The bottom line: Anybody who thinks that [ARM will have more than 1% market share
>1 year after the introduction of the first ARM Cortex-A9 netbook] is insane!

We'll see. Predicting the future is hard and some kinds of insanity are catching.