Windows XP was supposed to be finished. Microsoft spent two years pushing Vista as the successor; retail sales of XP officially ended in June, and the company’s entire marketing effort focused on moving everyone forward. Then netbooks happened, and Microsoft quietly extended XP’s life again, specifically to sell it on machines Vista cannot run acceptably.
The reason is sitting right there in the sales figures for the category that started this. The original Eee PC shipped with a customized Linux distribution, priced accordingly, and sold in large enough numbers that every manufacturer piling into netbooks this year had to decide which operating system to ship.
Vista was never a candidate. The hardware in these machines, a small low-power processor and a gigabyte of memory or less, cannot run it with any dignity, and everyone involved knows it. That left two real options: Linux, which is free to license and runs comfortably within these constraints, or a much older version of Windows that is light enough to fit the same hardware.
Microsoft chose to resurrect the older version rather than concede the category, and the reasoning is not complicated. A customer’s first computer sets defaults that are expensive to change later. Whatever software habits, whatever assumptions about how a file browser works or how a program gets installed, get set on that first machine and tend to carry over to the next one. Losing an entire new hardware category to Linux while it was small and cheap would have been a gift to exactly the operating system Microsoft has spent a decade trying to keep out of ordinary people’s homes.
So XP gets a special reprieve, licensed at a price low enough to compete with free, on a category of hardware that did not exist when the operating system was designed.
I do not think this changes where things ultimately land. Vista’s successor will eventually run acceptably on hardware this size, and when it does the special exception disappears along with the reason for it. What this buys Microsoft is time, on a category that grew faster than anyone predicted, at exactly the moment a free alternative had its best opening in years to become the default rather than the curiosity.