Microsoft thinks it might be. In reporting record revenues, the software giant buried this nugget: netbooks represented 8 percentage of the company’s PC sales a year ago. Now, it’s down to 2 percent.

That casts a dim light on Microsoft’s Windows 7 Starter Edition, the low-cost version of Windows 7 that effectively defeated go the Linux-based netbook. Just isn’t it in Microsoft’s best stake to see the netbook fade away, regardless?

Patrick Moorhead, a former corporate fellow with AMD and forthwith master at Moor Insights and Strategy, has watched the traditional netbook an Atom-based, small-form-factor notebook that costs about $399 disappear from shop shelves. Netbooks get been relegated to Best Buy’s online shelves, for example, while higher-margin, recurring-revenue productions alike smartphones dominate its floors. Desktops are a thing of the past.

You may forgive Moorhead for thinking that the AMD Brazos platform, combined with a 10.6-inch screen and a good keyboard “crushed” the netbook market. Only what’s realize is that consumers loved the cost point, only wanted more for their money.

“In the end, and I experience been very realize on this since daytime one, is that netbooks are merely inexpensive notebooks that became popular,” Moorhead said. “They became replaced by higher-quality notebooks that were fulfilled by a selfsame like price and situation in the market.”

According to Moorhead, the next of the netbook isn’t the tablet, equally Acer seemed to imply with its decision to throw its lid into the tablet market last year. Instead, the future is something alike the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which oscillates between a tablet and a notebook, depending on whether it’s in a docked or undocked configuration.