M$ has announced that a netbook has a 10.2 inch screen or smaller. This means an OEM producing a netbook with a 10.3 inch screen will have to charge customers a huge premium in price for no better performance. Competitors who use GNU/Linux will have a huge advantage. We are witnessing the emergence of a market no longer enslaved by Wintel. The EU has enjoined Intel from messing with AMD‘s opportunities and M$ promises not to sell to netbooks with larger screens. This opens huge areas of the IT market to competition. GNU/Linux will run rampant on fields of ARM processors, large netbooks and AMD will be able to take on Intel in a more fair market. Let freedom reign.
On another front, NZ has stood up to M$ and dropped out of negotiations to continue shovelling money at M$. A country of 4 million people may soon be free of M$. This is not about a wholesale migration, just the end of the sweet deal M$ likes to have where people send money whether they get any new software or not. This gives NZ the freedom to adopt GNU/Linux where it makes sense because they do not have to spend money on that other OS. Many justify the continued use of that other OS simply because they have already paid for it and will keep paying. If you do not pay for lockin you don’t get locked in. It is all good.
UPDATE: SJVN has written about an example of OEMs running with GNU/Linux if M$ will not let them…
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Interestingly enough, otherwise, the Linux model has more and better options than the XP netbook. On the XP, your storage choices will be a 160GB hard drive or a 32GB SSD (solid state drive). For Linux, though, you also have the option of a 250GB hard drive. In addition, and this is important, on the XP system your only choice in memory is 1GB of RAM. If you go with Linux, though, you can have up to 2GBs.
Why? Because Microsoft won’t let vendors run XP Home, or Windows 7,on netbooks with more than 1GB of RAM. This mistake is going to bite Microsoft in the rump. Even on a netbook, people want the power to upgrade their systems Linux gives people that ability. Microsoft doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.
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<giggle> M$ has a problem. If they want to sell Vista/Vista II, they have to handicap XP. GNU/Linux and other Free Software is winning. M$ cannot even compete against its own products fairly… When they treat customers of XP unfairly, GNU/Linux and those disaffected customers win in a big way. It is all good. I would not be surprised to see someone sue over unfair trade practices of M$, but, in this case it would be M$’s own partners suing. Their business is selling and M$ will not allow them to sell what their customers want. This could be fun to watch.
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