For the cost of one night's stay in a New York hotel you can now buy a laptop that weighs 3.2 pounds, runs for more than seven hours with an extended battery, and is equally usable with Windows XP and the open-source Linux operating system. Pundits deride these "netbooks," saying they are good for little more than Web browsing and light editing. But I think these little machines are going to turn the personal-computer industry upside down.

The Asus Eee PC is widely seen as the first netbook to reach the U.S. market. Introduced in the fall of 2007, the Eee had a four-gigabyte solid-state disk (a "flash" drive) instead of a hard drive, and it ran Linux instead of Windows. Because it had a seven-inch screen and correspondingly tiny keyboard, industry experts predicted that Asus would be lucky to sell 300,000 units its first quarter in the market. It sold 350,000. Last year, roughly 10 million netbooks shipped, according to market research firm IDC.