Not providing advice based on realistic requirements rather than personal preferences is not advice in my mind, it is control of information. Anyway…

The story was about MS and a “crippled” version of Windows 7. I think MS are making yet another unpopular and short sighted blunder. This may come back to bite them, in fact I would be surprised if it didn't.

After the crappy press on Windows Vista they have got drunk with confidence on the Windows 7 pre-release feedback.

All they now need to do is spoil that by making a silly move to make users who want windows to think that XP is probably worth hanging onto!!

MS I give you the “how to easily shoot myself in the foot” prize

Why are they doing this?
Well lets face it they won't get push back from the hardware suppliers as they would prefer not to sell these devices as the profit margins are very low. They would much prefer to sell higher margin devices but and are only doing so because some sales are better than none and the Acers of this world started something that has generated huge interest so they have to respond or be left out.

They internal MS financial folk see it as a way of not reducing the sale price of the the full edition of Windows 7. Imaging if Windows 7 (home edition) was at the the competitive price point on netbooks, others would ask why they couldn't have that on standard PC's.

But for MS in the long run the consumers will roast them over it and the netbook sales will suffer. So most of the standard the corporates win and the consumer once again gets a raw deal.

I totally agree on other things though. Still, one thing to keep in mind is that Samsung is a Korean company, and virtually 99% of Korean on-line business rely on active-x, IE, silverlight or some other of the microsoft's abominations. Having said that, there is little to no incentive for them to sell or support linux for the local market. This might affect how they approach the issue of offering their hardware w/ linux globally.

Brad, I'm not sure there's such a thing as “to develop a Linux netbook”. They develop a netbook and can sell it w/ a linux distro or not. The only part of the process that might be called “development” is creating (and hopefully supporting) the linux driver packages, in case the current kernel can't handle some HW properly.

I would assume that most Linux users provide this type of support to friends and family, and are in a position to drive sales to companies that support Linux, regardless of whether the netbook being purchased actually runs Linux.