XP lives! – Netbook vendors will be able to get XP for an year after the release of Windows 7

Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows product management group said,

“OEMs that are using Windows XP on netbooks will have the ability to install Windows XP for one year — 12 months — after Windows 7 general availability,”

What a great news this is for the netbook vendors! This means that XP won’t be vanishing after the release of Windows 7, which should be out in January 2009. Long live XP

On the other hand, we won’t be able to see a lot of netbooks officially running Windows 7 as the Windows XP is available for just $15 to the netbook vendors (some say, it is even lower). This helps them to bundle XP with their netbooks at a pretty low price. It is a quite obvious that whenever Windows 7 becomes availbble, Microsoft will be charging a lot more than $15 licence fee per netbook from the vendors. This would ultimately increase the overall cost of the netbook, which can give free operating systems, say Linux, a pretty good chance to take away some share from Microsoft.