Analysts may have over-exaggerated the fall of netbooks in the ends of tablets. Apple iPad is a very formidable challenge for netbook makers, but it won’t be killing today’s netbooks by its own. According to ABI Research, netbook shipments could reach 120 million units by 2013, which is double the number of shipments by the end of 2010. While ASUS and Acer are dominating the netbook market these days, it seems only one of these two is destined to be the clear winner in a matter of few years:

it looks as if only Acer will continue to maintain its commanding lead; but at the same time there are more vendors competing head-to-head. Most of the other major names – HP, Dell, Lenovo – increased their market shares in 2009, while Samsung lost a couple of percentage points.

The netbook market is becoming more mature. That means this segment of the computer business will be consolidated in the near future. It would not be surprising to see many small players of today to get out of business in the near future. Netbooks will be in demand and continue to be strong as long as there is demand for recession-friendly laptops. But it’s foolish to write off tablets as a big challenge to these machines:

I think this [tablets] is an additive category of computing much like Netbooks were an additive category

Just like many analysts wrote off Apple iPhone in its early days, it seems that’s what some are doing with tablets such as iPad. The PC industry is changing and people are more open to those small, mobile computing solutions these days. Netbooks are considered to be portable today, but they do not come any close to tablets. So far, Apple has been going at it alone (among the top dogs). Will netbooks and desktop computers lose some of their markets to Android tablets? We will have to wait and see.