The day after the launch of the stylish S101 netbook in Taiwan , I had a brief interview with Jerry Shen, chief executive of Asus. I asked him what proportion of Eee PC netbook sales were Windows XP rather than Linux. Surprisingly, he told me. But he didn't tell me quite enough. Shen -- who is keen on Linux -- said Asus had hoped sales of Eee PCs would be 50:50 between XP and Linux, but actually they were 60:40 in XP's favour. (I assume that's for this calendar year.) So far, around 4m have been sold, and the target is 5m for this year. Linux got about 6 months start over XP, including four months this calendar year, so the market has swung XP's way. However, it's impossible to say where it will end up. I asked several Asus staff about figures for returns, but none thought that more Linux machines were being returned to stores. This is not the case at MSI, where Andy Tung, the Director of US Sales, told Laptop magazine : "The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks." He said: People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it's not what they are used to. They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. After trash-talking Microsoft and launching with a Linux netbook, Acer is also shipping XP, and that became its best seller at Amazon.com. (See Are ...
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