I'm not sure how to characterize this CNET post that appeared late last week. It's not wrong, yet I don't believe it represents anything really accurate or newsworthy. Instead, it's a good summary of conventional wisdom by an executive who really doesn't have a stake in the game.

I'll cite Crothers' quote, taken from a Raymond James IT conference presentation by Stu Pann, a vice president at the sales and marketing group at Intel: "We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market," he added.

What I found interesting was that Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle reported a lengthy netbook story just a day later, and asked Intel spokesman Bill Calder to comment on the netbook phenomenon -- or, based on Calder's response, on the Atom processor's role in it. (As of this post time, CNET's Crothers apparently never asked for a followup comment, although the logistics of the Thanksgiving holiday probably played a part.) If Intel had changed his stance, I would have expected Calder to spin the story that way. He didn't.

What justified Crothers' story was what he didn't say: Intel co-designed the original Eee PC with Asus, and Paul Otellini appeared on stage to help introduce it at the original Computex launch. But Intel's Atom suffered shortages as recently as May, an indicator that at least some of its strategy was working. Had anything changed?

Apparently not. On Monday, I fired off an email to Calder, who responded that Intel's netbook strategy remains unchanged, and that Pann's comments were misinterpreted.

"We went into this as a market growth opportunity thinking it could be first-time buyers in emerging markets and additional device buyers in mature [markets]," Calder said in an email. "That is still valid, although clearly mature markets and companion device purchases have really taken off."

And that's the news: netbooks haven't succeeded in emerging markets. Calder might be considered a bit of a biased source here, given the tit-for-tat with Intel and the OLPC project (which Intel later bypassed with its Classmate PC program). But I I think it's fair to say that the Eee PC's launch at the Stanford Shopping Center, as opposed to a poor school in Alabama, indicates that netbooks are being aimed at the well-to-do, rather than emerging markets.

The netbook has always been considered to be incremental to Intel's business; for a semiconductor giant with $10 billion in quarterly revenue, an emerging netbook market couldn't be anything but. And AMD's own disdainful stance on netbooks probably can be explained away by one thing: lack of a competitive product. I'll buy Dirk Meyer's statement that AMD is "ignoring the netbook phenomenon," but I'd be interested to see how many netbooks get reclassified as notebooks once the Conesus processor begins shipping.

Now if Jonny Shih of Asus had disparaged the netbook category, that would have been news.

Give credit where credit is due, though: Crothers was right to stick it out through the AMD presentation, and his discovery of Pann's comments was good reporting. My gut says his conclusions were overblown, however, and Intel appears to back me up.