HP UK pulls Linux from all new netbooks
Microsoft only option - unless you want an old model — HP has decided UK consumers don't want Linux-based netbooks. Actually, it appears to believe business buyers don't want the open-source OS either. — It emerged today that the company …
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands barely a month after HP rolled out a series of new low-cost computers at CES, where cheap machines were meant to widen HP's reach — and it quietly narrows them again by stripping Linux from the UK lineup. It also prefigures a broader retreat pattern at HP, which later pulled out of the Windows Home Server market entirely.
First-order effects
- UK consumers and business buyers configuring new HP netbooks now get Microsoft Windows as the only OS choice on current models; Linux survives only via leftover older stock.
- Microsoft effectively gains the entire HP UK netbook install base by default, removing the low-cost Linux option that had helped hold netbook prices down.
Second-order effects
- Rival OEMs face pressure to justify their own Linux SKUs with hard return-rate data — a debate Dell soon weighed in on, calling Linux-versus-Windows netbook returns a 'non-issue', undercutting the customer-demand rationale HP implied.
- Linux desktop vendors and distributors lose one of the highest-volume consumer channels for preinstalled open-source OSes in Europe, pushing them toward enthusiast and business niches instead.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer PC operating systems consolidate around a single incumbent vendor not because alternatives fail technically but because OEMs won't carry the support burden — a structural win for platform lock-in that outlasts any one product.
- HP's serial retreats from non-Windows and non-core software bets — this, the Home Server exit, and later killing its Windows 7 tablet project — point to an OEM strategy of shedding differentiation to protect margins, even as the netbook category itself proves ephemeral, with Dell quitting netbooks altogether within three years.
The trend: This is an early data point in the consolidation of consumer PC platforms around vendor-validated defaults, where OEM economics repeatedly crowd out open-source alternatives regardless of technical merit.