Windows wins a new battle in its face-off against Linux. Microsoft's claims that sales of netbooks, also dubbed “mini-notebooks” and “sub-notebooks,” have benefited Windows when it comes down to market share are now supported by a study performed by market analysis company NPD. At the start of February 2009, Brad Brooks, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Consumer Product Marketing, indicated that the company had spectacular Windows growth on small-notebook PCs. NPD revealed at the debut of March that Windows shipped on 90% of all netbooks while Linux was confined to the remaining 10%.

“According to our numbers the percent of netbooks sold with Windows is over 90% for the last three months (November, December, January), when sales actually began to happen (these are US numbers only). Before that there were very few sales and Linux was a much higher percent. For example 50% of all netbook sales in 2008 occurred in December in the US,” revealed Stephen Baker, vice president, Industry Analysis for NPD, according to Yahoo News.

Linux was initially regarded as the obvious choice for netbooks, especially since it added nothing to the price of such devices. However, Microsoft is apparently ready to take a hit in terms of revenue just to see netbooks shipping with Windows and not with the open-source rival OS. And the Redmond company indeed took a hit, as it missed revenue estimates in Q2 2009 by approximately $1 billion, with Windows Client division profits dropping, a situation also correlated with the jump in netbook sales, as the software giant gets paid less for Windows on mini-notebooks compared to normal PCs.

Still, despite this, the past month, Brooks ensured that Microsoft would deliver a strong focus on netbooks moving forward. The promise from the software giant is that all editions of Windows 7 will play nice with netbooks, unlike its precursor, Windows Vista.