During an Intel investor meeting Tuesday, the company's head of
marketing said netbooks cost some retailers dearly last summer, as they
experienced huge return rates due to misinformative marketing on their
part.
"In the first period--June, July, August of last year, there were
some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as
notebooks," said Sean Maloney. "They were running ads that had a continuum of
notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there, it was called a
notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys
had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster."
So, basically, they were to blame, not Intel. Maloney claims Intel
later approached the retail chains and advised them to market netbooks
differently, clearly state up front what they can and can't do, and
this seems to have remedied the problem.
More
here.