Cheaper than thou
When Microsoft announced the Windows 7 SKUs it was clearly keen to address speculation about a netbook edition. With that in mind it published an ‘interview' with Windows consumer product marketing VP Brad Brooks.
We put interview in inverted commas because it was conducted by Microsoft's own internal PR operation, but the fact that it was published at all shows how important Microsoft now realises the netbook market has become.
The press release was subtly entitled "Windows 7 Wins on Netbook PCs", but does it? As you'll see later in this piece, some pretty influential technology companies are investing in Linux distributions for netbooks which, of course, are much cheaper than Windows.
Let's deal with Microsoft's claims first, what follows are some quotes from the Brooks interview and our own commentary.
"To share some numbers: since February 2008, Windows OS share has gone from 10 percent to over 80 percent on these machines, and our research shows that these are overwhelmingly new PCs and/or PC users."
This is essentially an admission of the importance to Microsoft of taking netbook market share from Linux.
