[Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share

[Conrad Knauer]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Michael Brown
<michaelbrown2009 at gmail.com> wrote:

> im seeing more and more vendors offer systems with ubuntu and other
> linux distros. i agree with bert07 that they are finally starting to see
> the linux community.

Speaking of "vendors" who are "starting to see the linux community", I
note that Lenovo is not one of them:

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/05/09/lenovo-on-the-future-of-
the-netbook/

---
The other challenge has been, in order to keep the price points down,
a lot of people thought that Linux would be the saviour of all of
these netbooks.

You know, there were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves
$50 or $100 or whatever it happens to be, based on Microsoft’s pricing
and, again, from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns
because people didn’t know what to do with it.

Linux, even if you’ve got a great distribution and you can argue which
one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody
who is using Windows.

So, we’ve seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows
because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and
it’s ready to go.
---

I'm going to call 'revisionist history' on Lenovo BTW; People didn't
want "to stay with Windows", they wanted to stay with Windows *XP*.
Yet at the same time, XP (which is still much more widely used than
Vista; e.g. see
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10
and http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-weekly-200827-200921) had all but
gone extinct on regular machines from the big OEMs.  Thus there was a
high demand for it with low supply.  When XP netbooks entered the
market at a price point of less than half what Vista notebooks cost,
they sold quite well as you might have expected!  You'll note that
while there are fewer Linux-based netbooks than XP ones available, you
don't see any in stores with Vista O:)  Also it turns out that
Microsoft only charged the OEMs $15 per XP Home license on netbooks
(http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/19/ms.asks.15.for.xp.netbooks/)
which explains why they didn't cost significantly more than the Linux
ones.  And while MSI apparently had 4x (!) higher return rates on
their SUSE systems than they did with those preloaded with XP, Dell's
netbooks shipping with Ubuntu (a full third!) had about the same
return rate as those with XP
(http://blog.laptopmag.com/one-third-of-dell-inspiron-mini-9s-sold-run-linux).
 What this says to me is that MSI didn't do a good job of
picking/testing/tweaking/marketing their distro of choice, while Dell
did.

My prediction is that companies which decide to put Windows 7 Starter
(limited to 3 concurrent applications... can we say "crippleware"? ;)
on netbooks are going to have unhappy customers and low sales, those
who continue to preload XP will continue to do well and those that
preload Ubuntu will see increasing sales.

-- 
Microsoft has a majority market share
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1
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