Intel's netbook dominance has yet to be challenged in a serious way, but at least one business analyst thinks that's going to change in the next 2-3 years. The netbook market is extremely new; Atom itself isn't even a year old—if the IT industry were to break with the existing Intel+Microsoft model, the emergence of a new product type combined with a deep economic recession could be the perfect opportunity to do it.

Analyst Robert Castellano from The Information Network believes future netbooks based on the upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 architecture and running Linux could create a market for netbooks at price points Intel and Microsoft simply won't be able to match. Not only would the multicore A9 be cheaper than a 2012 Atom (at least, according to Castellano), the assumed ubiquitousness of cloud computing would supposedly eliminate (or almost eliminate) the need for local storage.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...ks-by-2012.ars

I wonder if he puts his money where his mouth is like so many other analysts don't.