The Truth Behind the Death of Linux On the Netbook

eldavojohn writes "Groklaw brings us news of Microsoft holding the smoking gun in regards to the death of Linux on netbooks. You see, the question of Linux on netbooks in Taiwan was put forth to the Taiwan Trade Authority director, who replied, 'In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They want to promote open source and Linux. But if you begin from the PC you are afraid of Microsoft. They try to go to the smart phone or PDA to start again.' It's simple; fear will keep them in line. PJ points out, 'So next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people prefer their software to Linux on netbooks, you'll know better. If they really believed that, they'd let the market speak, on a level playing field. If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse really faster? If so, why shoot my horse?'"

Comments

smoking gun and hard evidence

[viralMeme]

"There is simply no hard evidence that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly to crush Linux on netbooks"

'The very next day, Asus' chairman, Jonney Shih, after sharing a news conference stage with Microsoft corporate VP, OEM Division, Steven Guggenheimer, apologized for the Android Eee PC being shown'

Microsofts Walmart/Linux Taskforce

'We invest big, big $$ in Dell .. we be quite prescriptive in our investments with Dell relative to the competitive threats we see with Linux .. we constantly benchmark ourselves against the actions they do with RedHat'

'A cross-group team has been working for the last two weeks on a proposal to have a more planned response process to defend against Linux and other low-cost/no-cost competitors in large education/government deals in both developed and developing subs'

Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly

[hitmark]

When the eeepc first hit the market, two things showed up:

1. Blogs and forums about how to get terminal and root, so that one could edit the package repo list and install debian packages.

2. Blogs and forums about how to install xp...

Asus eeepc used a xandros made distro, based of a somewhat aged debian version...

Acer aspire one used a linpus made distro, based of a similarly aged fedora version...

MSI wind used opensuse, but messed up when it came to drivers...

I'm not fully sure what HP is using...

Dell uses ubuntu...

HP and dell was slow onto market, and may well be the ones that triggered the price climb towards the low end laptop range. The first HP model was higher priced then the rest when it first launched, with the excuse that it was aimed at the prosumer or business market.

Also, Acer at least ended up shipping windows models that had more bang for mostly the same buck. Only asus did the opposite when they launched the 900 with more flash storage on the linux model vs the windows one, at the same price.

And speaking of flash storage, it seems that most netbooks these days comes with a hardrive rather then flash. Sad really, as my opinion was that flash, tho giving less overall storage, allowed for a more rugged machine. Comboed with the price, that allowed for a machine one could "abuse" a bit more. And all had a SD slot anyways, so if one needed storage, grab a couple of SD's and stuff them in the wallet or some other container and swap them as needed...