Netbooks are flourshing now because technology has gotten to the point where you can fit a full OS on them. It has nothing to do with the OLPC
But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups?
http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html
For years prior to the OLPC, we had been able to make a small laptop with a full OS... The OLPC's AMD Geode CPU was seven years old at the time they chose to use it. What none of the manufacturers realized was that there was any sort of market for a vastly underpowered, almost unusably cramped, extremely cheap laptop that attempts to run a full OS. The media buzz created by the OLPC revealed this market.
She is right that without Negroponte there would be no OLPC, and she is also probably correct that without the OLPC's tremendous "$100 laptop" buzz in 2006, there would be no Asus Eee in 2007, which really kicked off the netbook craze.
Regarding the discussion of whether computers belong in children's hands, I had the opposite reaction: The idea that each child should have their own laptop computer that they carry with them is still a fairly controversial one, IMHO. Negroponte hardly ended the discussion, but he did serve to legitimize/popularize Seymour Papert's earlier Dynabook proposal.