Linux Netbooks Return Rates are 4 Times Higher than Windows, but how Microsoft is Gonna Lose it Again

While such a claim has been rather emphatic from Microsoft’s point of view, but analysts predict that sales of netbooks will grow nearly 80% this year to 21 million units, while overall PC sales decline by 11.9%. And Microsoft is quite aware of that. WSJ reports that Windows XP at a discounted rate is already on the cards for netbooks. Unnamed sources report that Microsoft is charging less than $ 15 for per copy of Windows XP in a netbook. And if XP and Vista (which was a failure for netbooks considering the hardware support it needs and the outcome is absolutely nothing) are here, can Windows 7 be far behind? According to Microsoft, the Starter edition in Windows 7 was created so that Windows 7 can be offered on even the least expensive netbooks.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

Netbooks are expected to run better on Windows 7 than Vista, which required more powerful hardware than netbooks offered. To encourage use of the new software, the company plans to offer a version called Starter that will be inexpensive but comes with significant limits. Besides only running only three application programs at a time, Starter will also lack some spiffy graphical interface features of other versions of Windows 7.

This point will hardly attract any buyer to go for Windows 7 considering Windows XP doesn’t have such limitations and is giving a huge discount. Then again,as Zdnet rightly puts in,

Linux means they won’t need to hog processor cycles with anti-malware software and can easily run OpenOffice, a web browser, an IM client, and music software at the same time. Without upgrading Starter Edition (whose 3-application limitations do not include anti-virus), they would have already hit the 3-app limit.

So, though Microsoft self-triumphantly talks of the dominance, Linux community can actually learn and recover rectifying mistake. And as far as predictions about Microsoft goes, 3-app limit is just enough to disinterest people of an OS (Windows 7) in a netbook, that had and has promise to bring in the Microsoft Windows supremacy again. But alas, MS…