You had to see the death of the netbook. The little laptops are unbearably cramped, with crappy keyboards, tiny touchpads, and screen resolutions that could make even your grandparents beg for more. Netbooks were the lame intermediary while tablets waited for their messiah, and now that they have one, the tablets are taking over.

According to a study by Retrevo, some 70 percent of netbook buyers were courted by the iPad and 30 percent made the final commitment. Though those other 40 percent still stuck with their netbooks, I’d imagine the decision was largely financial. It’s hard to beat $200 for a semi-functional computer to kick around. It’s hard to put a price on not looking pretentious, too.

That 30 percent isn’t exactly the blowout you might expect, but it is a signpost pointed at the heart of the netbook industry. Manufacturers like Dell would do well to pay attention. The great thing about netbooks was portability and nothing else. If you can get the portability with more interesting device, that netbook is going to start to look pretty crappy and you might want to look into a more powerful Lenovo notebook computer, or just go for the iPad if ultimate portability is what you’re looking for.

Last week the Google logo was turned into a playable version of the classic Pac-Man. It was completely awesome, and I can honestly say I spent too much time chasing blue ghosts (and of course smashing my fists on my desk when one of them suddenly because a real ghost again just as my hungry, yellow mouth touched it). Apparently I wasn’t the only one playing.

I don’t know if you pay much attention to RescueTime but you better hope your boss doesn’t. RescueTime is a productivity analysis tool that shows companies how their employees are spending their time, supposedly in the hopes of helping them. The company did a little research on the time spent at the Google homepage when Pac-Man launched, and the results are astounding.

This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

-Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
-$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
-For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
-$298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Pac-Man data journey as much as we have. Next up in our on our data-hacking list, we’ll be digging in to find the laziest and most productive countries and cities in the world. Where do you think yours ranks?

Crazy numbers. I love stuff like this, even if it serves no practical purpose in my own life. Oh, and as far as that productivity thing goes, I can tell you where my city ranks. I live in a beach town. No one is ever doing anything.

I’ve spent most of my tech reading time over the past few days reviewing the world’s reactions to Google I/O. Google announced some pretty cool stuff for Android, and the company clearly has Apple in its sights when it comes to market share. Even more interesting to me, though, was that the “Microsoft” didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind. John Gruber put together a great read on the subject, so I’ll defer to him here.

As Gruber sees it, Google is taking its gigantic, Android-shaped bite out of Microsoft’s pie, not Apple’s. Google is the licensed OS player because it licenses Android for free, not on a fee-per-unit basis. That says nothing of Microsoft’s crazy volume requirements to turn a profit. The company currently charges something between $8 and $12 per handset. When you hold just 6.8 percent of the world market share, that license fee is a joke.

The volume game isn’t necessarily where you find the profits, either. Nokia sells a LOT more units than Apple, but Apple still makes a better profit. Microsoft is in an absolutely awful position to make a dent in the market. Hell, they still haven’t even launched a competitive platform. Microsoft was already too late when the iPhone launched three years ago. I have to thank John Gruber for this Ballmer quote about the iPhone launch, which I had never seen before:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”

Well, Steve, I have bad news. The iPhone OS was just reported at 15.2 percent of the global market share. That 80 percent market share you were hoping for? Yeah, that’s never going to happen.

Source: Daring Fireball

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has had some…interesting…things to say about the future of the web and her company’s competition with Google. This latest tidbit, which comes courtesy of a BBC interview, is a real humdinger.

According to Bartz:
Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search…It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do…Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.

What’s that now, Carol? At the risk of sounding the Google fanboy, I’m willing to call this lady nuts. Completely bonkers, actually. No sane person can honestly say Google lacks diversity. The company is reaching into every aspect of web-connected living, or life as some call it. HP just dropped Microsoft in favor of Google’s OS for tablet devices and let’s not forget that Google as a search engine is the juggernaut of the industry. That says nothing of the other services Google provides. In case, like Carol Bartz, you’ve forgotten what that portfolio looks like, you can check out a full list of products here.

If that still doesn’t have you convinced, consider this chart from the NYT comparing the endeavors of the world’s great tech empires.