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Re: [News] Sub-notebooks Are Harming Microsoft (Margins, GNU/Linux Growth)



RonB wrote:
On Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:52:32 -0600, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Netbooks are a win for Microsoft? Think again.

,----[ Quote ]
| And given that price is the most important element of the netbook market, the | moment Microsoft feels they've solidified their market share and being | raising prices, their share will vaporize. Linux's existence on netbooks will continue to create a loss for them, regardless of how much "market | share" they have. And the best part is, as people get used to Linux on the netbooks, they'll eventually want it on the desktop as well. And that's something that Microsoft will do anything to avoid.
`----

http://www.raiden.net/?cat=2&aid=521

The problem for them is that there is nothing they can do, especially as the price of netbooks go down.


They can forget about making money on any systems that cost under $200. The best they can hope for is to shut out other OSes (notably Linux) as much as they can. They are having some success as netbook hardware becomes more capable.

But it is likely there will continue to be hardware (MIDs, smartphones, and the cheapest netbooks) good enough to run Linux but not good enough to run inefficient Windows.

An article Roy posted this morning http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/03/0146256 indicates they may be planning to adapt BSD (cf. NeXT and Mac OS) for low-power hardware. Again they won't be able to make money due to the general price squeeze, but they may be able to use the efficiency of BSD to block Linux adoption.

Funny thing is that they wouldn't gain much by blocking Linux with anything other than Windows. Increased usage of any OS other than Windows contributes to the attractiveness of cross-platform development and works to break the OS monopoly.

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