Another One Bites the Dust -- Nothing About the Bakken

The "netbook" is dead; squeezed by the iPad and the MacBook Air.

The netbook industry will be winding down in the first quarter of 2013, as major players Asus and Acer will be shutting down production of the tiny notebooks.  -- The Guardian

Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold. -- Slate

I was going to leave it there ... and then ...  "rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly" ... a vision of the Surface flashed in front of me.