Netbooks Poised to Be the New OS Battleground?

In 2009, it won’t be the “year of the desktop” for any operating system–instead, the coveted trophy seems to be “year of the netbook.”

Linux, thus far, has been a serious contender in the mobile Internet device (MID) category–small- to mid-size devices with more oomph than a smartphone but less power than an notebook or laptop. Typically these devices, which Intel has coined netbooks, share the common feature of being pre-installed with a basic toolset to surf the net and get some work done: browser, media viewers, word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail client. They also usually have solid-state on-board sotrage capacity, like super-agile internal Flash drives.

Linux has done well here, because of the headstart it received from MID manufacturers when they concluded very quickly that Linux was (a) less expensive and (b) easier to configure to run as an OEM platform on netbooks.

This week, however, as more pundits get their heads wrapped around Windows 7, there is a growing sense that Microsoft might be staging a comeback on this platform. Well, comeback might be the wrong word, since Windows was hardly on the platform to start with.

Hack IT Linux’ Jeff Goldman has a nice round-up of some of these stories, which give both sides of the netbook OS debate. His summary of Maximum PC’s point is spot on:

“But Maximum PC’s David Murphy contends that in the netbook market - which is what this is really about - it’ll still come down to cost.”

And Murphy’s right… cost will be the big factor in how well each OS succeeds. While there seem to be some technical merits for Windows 7 as a netbook platform, at the end of the day, this is still being driven by Microsoft, the company that invented whole new ways to squeeze money out of the market–usually at the expense of its OEM vendors. But OEM vendors aren’t putting up with this behavior anymore–if they were recently, the financial headlines and their own accounting books will quickly convince them that the biggest profit margin is the way to go.

Paying Microsoft their licensing fees is not going to help them acheive that bigger margin, but running Linux certainly will.