This story could be picked straight out of Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma". As of today, these small, cheap computers are in most ways that

This story could be picked straight out of Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma". As of today, these small, cheap computers are in most ways that matter inferior to their monolithic laptop and desktop counterparts. But many large players fear that they will grow in market share and hence start eating their margins. Fujitsu even goes as far as to deliberately stay out of the market. However, the only reason that these smaller machines are less capable is that most processing today happens on the local machine. If web applications grow in the direction that Hacker News hopes, there will only be games and specialty applications (research and industry, plus maybe a few consumer applications) that require the horsepower of a traditional computer. Today, you could (rightly) state that lightweight machines are unergonomic and troublesome, but history dictates that with this much demand for a niche product, these problems will evaporate in a jiffy. Even if the future still has a huge demand for desktop processing (say, if lots of data-transfer intensive things like video editing and processing become much more popular), lightweight machines still have huge competitive benefits: light weight, small size, low price and long battery life. One can even imagine the 'low price' requirement waivered, which would give manufacturers headroom to innovate further in form factor. I'm thinking something in the direction of what the OLPC team is experimenting with: multiple touchscreens, enabling new areas of computer use. No doubt there is lots of territory to be explored here. Fujitsu (and maybe even Dell) is making a huge mistake in not embracing this nascent market. It's a good thing for their investors that they are diversified. Give it five years, and computers resembling these will be everywhere. Fujitsu will be unable to catch up. These machines will easily gobble up the part of the market which uses laptops as portable word-processors and email-readers, and will probably expand into uses for which which today's laptops are completely unsuitable.