I hate to call netbooks a section of the PC market. They’re just laptops. Small laptops. That’s all. The world’s great surprise at the success of the netbook makes as little sense to me as defining these little laptops as their own section of the market does. We’re in a recession and the machines are cheap. It’s also not a secret that computers usually deliver more than most consumers ever need. Smaller, less-powerful laptops are a welcome deviation from that course. So why is Michael Dell bashing the tiny PCs?

Speaking at a dinner party in Silicon Valley last night, Dell said user excitement with netbooks lasts all of 36 hours. Dell says users long for their larger screens, their bigger keyboards, shortly after the netbook thrill passes. “We see a fair amount of customers not really being that satisfied with the smaller screen and the lower performance, unless it’s like a secondary machine or it’s (a) very first machine and the expectations are low,” said Dell. “But as a replacement machine for an experienced user, it’s not what we’d recommend. It’s not a good experience, and we don’t see users very happy with those.”

It’s a strange sentiment from the CEO of a company that has a full line of netbooks for sale. Apparently this was Dell’s way of saying his company can give a customer options, that it can meet any need. As Don Reisinger at CNet pointed out, netbook sales have gone up 264% in Q2 over last year, while notebook sales dropped 14%. Mr. Dell would likely do well to consider those numbers when making sweeping statements about the future of the computer market.