Lenovo: Windows will dominate netbooks

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 11 May 2009 at 09:01

Lenovo claims that Windows 7 is set to tighten Microsoft's grip on the netbook market.

Microsoft was initially caught out by the netbook invasion, with Linux distros dominating early models such as the Asus Eee PC.

The software giant sparked controversy recently when it claimed 96% of new netbooks run Windows - a claim hotly disputed by Ubuntu distributor, Canonical.

Now Lenovo has added fuel to the fire, claiming that consumers are confused by Linux netbooks.

"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," claims Lenovo's worldwide competitive analyst, Matt Kohut, in an interview with Tech.Blorge.

"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."

The Lenovo man claims Windows 7 will give Microsoft an even greater advantage on the low-cost devices. "Windows 7 is going to have, not a true netbook version, but a version [Starter] intended to work especially well on netbooks," says Kohut.

"One of the cool things that Windows 7 does is touch. So, it's not far off to have a netbook where you have full touch integration built into it and not just drag/drop but full multitouch where you've got all the gestures."

Khout admits that Lenovo may still have to do some work on the touch interface itself. "One of our focus areas specifically is how do we overlay on top of what Windows is offering," he says.

"If you are going to bring in touch, how do we overlay common tabs so that now we can enter numbers, [and] how do we make the keypad bigger, for example?"