Eben erst bei ESR gelesen:

Fundamentally, what’s going on here is that Microsoft, long used to effective monopoly and to the profit margins and strategic maneuvering room monopoly brings, is losing all three of those. Microsoft is no longer a price-maker; the hardware manufacturers hold the whip hand now, and all they have to do to beat Redmond into making ever less money per sale is to push Linux harder.

[...]

There are only two ways for this game to end. One is with the visible collapse of Microsoft’s monopoly in new systems, but allowing it to retain price levels on a niche market of PCs running legacy applications. The other is with Microsoft bargaining its own margins away to retain netbook market share and collapsing when its reduced run rate can no longer sustain new-product development.