While this is NOT a blog about technology (even though I tend to obsess on the subject), there seem to be kernals of learning in the emerging story of the netbook -- those mini-laptop Internet appliances that are storming the market. Wired has a good story on where they came from and how they're setting the established computer players on their ears.

If you haven't seen them (you will soon), netbooks are about the size of a thin paperback book, with tiny LCD screens (7 inches up to 10 or so), cramped keyboards, and almost no storage capacity (think EEE PC, or Aspire One). They're a polar opposite to the increasingly fast and powerful laptops we've come to know (even though those are getting thinner and lighter). And they were waived away as toys by the major players.

But what netbooks actually represented was a cost and scale innovation that was responding to a latent market desire. Since the bulk of our mobile lives is now spent on-line, with documents on the Internet (in blogs, social network systems, or data clouds like Google Apps), the established criteria for portable computers no longer applies as much. Says the article:

Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models...But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop--they wanted less.

How is this relevant to cultural managers? In our quest for productive responses to a bad market, and in our thinking about adjusting our work to engage with a new universe of hyper-connected users, we seem to be struggling with "legacy systems." We're still trying to make minor adjustments to our current business models to bend them toward the challenge.

In many/most established industries, true and radical innovation rarely comes from the established players (both because they strive to protect their current operating model, but also because they've trained themselves not to see other options). Rather, it requires an outsider without our baggage or our focused perspective to shake how we think about what we do. It's absolutely essential to sustain and engage any organization you happen to be working with. But it might be a good time to scan the local horizon for the upstarts, and see what they're hatching.

On the downside, the netbook model seems to have no visible means of support. They cost just barely more than the sum of their parts. And they could become substitutes (rather than just second computers) for the higher-margin computing devices. What's an industry to do?