Summary
LG makes good equipment. Its reliable and sturdy and does what it says. I would not use the word glitzy to describe their offerings. If they are going to jump back into a market where they did not do well once (a rather unprofitable market for even the best of companies), they have to have something that will truly grab the consumer by the throat and mesmerize him. I don't see that happening.
Analysis
Steve Jobs was right when it said it is very difficult to make a really special netbook or tablet computer at a low price point. All the current players in this market are putting out "cheap" but at a serious sacrifice in usability. I've tried several different brands of netbook. They are flimsy and break when you look at them crosswise. Add to that the inability to expand them to actually meet the needs of a lot of the user base and you have something which will sell for a while until the deficiencies are impossible to ignore any longer. 1 GB of memory and a tiny disk really constricts what I can do "on the road". To get my job done, I have no choice except to lug a laptop around (while the MacBook Air comes close, its tradeoffs are draconian to where I would have to buy an additional computer for many of my day to day tasks. If all you want to do is take notes at a meeting, a netbook is fine. If you want to do anything even moderately serious off the web - forget it.
If LG was really serious, they would design a series of "docking bars" which could be plugged into the side of their notebook computer. You could expand your machine to meet your needs to whatever degree you needed at a manageable increase in size and weight. If all you needed was additional memory there could be a plug in with additional RAM and/or a solid state disk. If you were not going to need it, just just pop it off and leave it on your desk.
Unless LG does something really neat and different (and hopefully defensible from an intellectual property or business perspective), they will just be pouring money down the same old rat hole.
The philosophy of the current netbook manufacturers is "if we build it, they will come". As the customer base gets more sophisticated and demanding, they will adopt a different mantra "hell no, we won't go". LG should use their market hiatus as a chance to design something which is a real game changer while its competitors are beating each other to death with price cuts on woefully underpowered toys.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
