Start was slow and painful, but decline in economy plus ever desired need for light, compact and more importantly inexpensive laptops.
To be initially considered a niche product it surely picked speed and right now among 10 top selling laptops in Wal-Mart 5 are netbooks.
This is what JkOnTheRun writes:
"Let's look at sales numbers for the third quarter. Last week we saw smartphone numbers out of Gartner and they showed 4.7 million iPhones shipped. DisplaySearch just reported netbook sales for the same quarter and they came in 5.6 million units sold.
Let's put these numbers in another light as people so often discuss Apple's staggering growth in the mobile phone market even though it's a market they only entered in June of 2007. It truly is staggering that they can capture so much market share in less than 18 months. But the first netbook wasn't even available when Apple's first iPhone handset arrived. In fact, you need to wait another four months or so for the original Asus Eee PC 701, which we saw around October of 2007. I'd call that the unofficial "birth" of the netbook market, meaning it's a younger product than the iPhone. Yet it has now surpassed the iPhone in terms of sales and it's doing so at a faster growth rate."