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After hav­ing it on back order for what seems forever, I’ve recently got Adapt­ive Path’s new book, Sub­ject to Change. And so far, so good.

Broadly speak­ing the thrust of it is that you can’t stop things chan­ging but if you start from the per­spect­ive of deliv­er­ing a great cus­tomer exper­i­ence you will stand a bet­ter chance over time. Of course, work­ing out what ‘great’ means for your cus­tom­ers is not always simple. And then the real trick is actu­ally doing it. The focus of the book is primar­ily on product design but the prin­ciples go further.

When you con­sider that in many mar­kets any real dif­fer­en­ti­ation between products is close to non-existent and then factor in the speed of change and the lim­ited atten­tion of cus­tom­ers, a shift in focus could be wise. Tra­di­tion­ally this means focus­ing on brand but with ever grow­ing dis­en­chant­ment with brands as all spin, little sub­stance another approach may be better.

Focus­ing more expli­citly on cus­tom­ers’ exper­i­ences of mar­ket­ing leads to think­ing about some­thing more immers­ive that has value in its own right. It tends to strip out gim­micks (never a bad thing). And it high­lights the tru­ism that com­mu­nic­a­tion is about what the audi­ence takes out not what we put in.

The authors have thought­fully put up a present­a­tion cov­er­ing the core themes of the book – it’s half an hour well spent.

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Like many people, I’ve owned and used a suc­ces­sion of laptops over the years – not to men­tion selling them on behalf of a vari­ety of cli­ents. Over that time the screens have got big­ger (and bet­ter) as have the hard drives and per­form­ance for most tasks is com­par­able to a desktop.

Of course the price we pay for this is that the ori­ginal computer-on-the-move idea behind laptops has been largely lost from many mod­els. They are increas­ingly designed to be taken from room to room not coun­try to coun­try. Many are full-on media centres able to store all your DVDs, CDs and pho­tos. Up to a point it seemed that this trend was unstoppable.

Until that is, some bright spark took a fresh look at what most people really use laptops for (web, mail, a bit of word pro­cessing etc) stripped away a lot of the extraneous bits and pieces and came up with the netbook.

Basic­ally, net­books are tiny laptops whose main func­tion is to get users online and allow them to do a few basic tasks. Increas­ingly using Intel’s new Atom pro­cessor and often fea­tur­ing solid state drives, net­books avoid the “added value” ele­ments that are nor­mally included in today’s laptops (but rarely used by real live people).

The poster child so far has been ASUS’s Eee PC which was launched with a 7″ screen, a 4 gig solid state drive and WiFi – and has sold hun­dreds of thou­sands of units in a pretty short space of time. But the Eee PC is not alone – there’s the Cloud­book, MSI Wind, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC and the Noah­pad among oth­ers with new options from the like of Dell in the offing.

Inter­est­ingly, pretty much all net­books either have Linux as their default OS or offer it as an option. And, des­pite the still rel­at­ively low take-up on other PCs, on the net­books it doesn’t seem to mat­ter to users. Because net­books are first and fore­most inter­net devices, as long as you can get web, mail, IM and Skype who cares? And, of course, LInux is free so it keeps the price down too.

The scary thing for those in Red­mond is: once people real­ise that, for what they need, Linux is abso­lutely fine and that they can get oodles of other applic­a­tions abso­lutely free – why go back? In fact, why not install it on other laptops and your desktop PCs for that matter?

Per­son­ally, I’m pretty temp­ted by a net­book, it’d be like a web-enabled Mole­skine. But, of course, a 9″ Mac­Book Air might just prove irresistible.