“The fact is, people don’t care that the computer they’re buying is cheap and running an old OS; it does what they need it to. That must hurt Microsoft.”

Wrong. If Microsoft does one thing well, it’s win market share and make money. Any product that gets more users on Windows and off of Linux / Apple would never be actively fought by Redmond. Microsoft still makes money for every netbook sold with XP. And furthermore, if netbooks didn’t sell with Windows, they’d sell with Linux. If more people get comfy with Linux, that IS a competitive threat. So Microsoft’s best play is to sell the hell out of XP licenses.

Your comment that Win7 Starter is netbook friendly is also odd. An OS with a window limit is unfriendly to everyone. Just a bad decision made by some marketing moron at MS, and it got the treatment it deserved. You say in your last sentence that Microsoft needs to realize the customer is right. You’re contradicting your own point – didn’t the repeal of the application cap do exactly that? Microsoft took the feedback and changed the product before it even hit the market.

Looking at Win7, I think the entire OS was engineered to perform as fast and with as low system requirements as XP. Read between the lines here – Microsoft clearly built Win7 to run on netbooks in any SKU, not just starter. However, if you think about the value of additional features and the price you need to pay, most customers would never upgrade from starter at all. The 3-app cap sounds like a dirty trick to annoy users into paying more for the higher end SKU’s, making Microsoft more $$ than Starter would. That has nothing to do with killing the netbook, or netbooks at all. It’s just Microsoft will have a hard time justifying a $500 SKU when snow leopard sells for $30.

And your second point is completely off base. Intel has a trademark on the term “netbook”. They threatened to sue all of their partners if they continued to use the term. Thus the ridiculous “low cost…” terminology. No one is going to call it anything but a netbook in real life, but Microsoft can’t officially say netbook in an ad, speech, or presentation without a lawsuit.

Something about great minds thinking alike. :P

MS is in dire need of a hardcore new antitrust lawsuit. Maybe that’ll get’em back in line.

As things stand, there is no competition. Apple doesn’t compete on price, and the return rates for Linux distributions are too high. But collide007 raises an interesting possibility in that something like Moblin or Android may present Microsoft with a very real problem.

Anti-competitive behaviours seem to be ingrained into the culture of Microsoft. Rather than focussing on producing a simple, lightweight OS of their own, they’re concentrating on attacking the competition and offering netbook users their desktop OS with a few features removed.

Secondly, it is obvious that the author is biased, and makes the statement “are at best morally questionable and at worst crying out for an anti-competition case against them”. I laugh every time I read statements such as this. They are generally made by Apple fanbois who fail to see the irony in their own statements.

Apple lets you run the Windows OS on their machines, but fail to allow their Intel-based OS to be installed on non-Apple machines. I would certainly say that is anti-competitive behavior, especially since they advertise this as a selling point on their machines. Argue all you want about the reasons behind this, the Apple OS is running on thousands of non-Apple machines out there, and running stable. It’s something Apple can allow but does not. It is anti-competitive behavior at its finest, and hypocrisy at its best.