That's how it started, and how I saw it running last November when I visited Taipei. It's really meant to run Linux.
Microsoft is in desperation mode. That's the only reason they're allowing this. They see their market getting eaten from above (OS-X, Macs) and below (Linux, Eee-PC).
Even with 90% of the desktop market still theirs, they sense the deterioration, and are willing to allow XP to live even though it hurts Vista, because otherwise their market will collapse around them.
For a story of how an Empire can collapse even though it rules everything, read Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy.
Microsoft is in desperation mode. That's the only reason they're allowing this. They see their market getting eaten from above (OS-X, Macs) and below (Linux, Eee-PC).
Even with 90% of the desktop market still theirs, they sense the deterioration, and are willing to allow XP to live even though it hurts Vista, because otherwise their market will collapse around them.
Absolutely. This is something that I've been talking about for a while. Until this announcement, it appeared that microsoft had abandoned the low end of the PC market completely because Vista just simply cannot compete in this space at all. This is really bad news for microsoft because they've bloated their code with piss-poor programming and DRM that sucks the performance out of a system that they may have finally given the opening competing products like Linux have needed.
Apple and Microsoft are effectively competing in the same space of the higher-end systems. Sure, manufacturers will put Vista on mid-level PCs, but those setups are really being sold to the clueless who will pay the price of their ignorance in crappy performance.
This is a smart move by MS as it is clear that Vista is a dog in the marketplace.