The way that the netbook 'evolutionary branch' went from lean and mean to underspecified bloated windows small laptops is one where I really wonder if MS suffocated something that would have been to their benefit longer term if only they could have put out their own lean OS and an ecosystem of lean software to run on it.

It was at the time mobiles were picking up momentum, and just before tablets arrived on the scene (the ipad launched 2010, the tablet focused Android 3 came out in 2011), and a lot of people migrated away from windows for their personal computing needs. There's also been MS's ultimately failed efforts for their own mobile platform. Besides the established huge momentum of gaming and professional/office usage it's difficult to see why consumers would move to windows, or what MS offers to prevent the momentum slowing and linux slowly chipping away at it.

I worked at a computer shop at the time. Few consumers wanted the Linux versions: they all chose Windows. I'm not sure the license was free, as the Windows machines were more expensive with the same hardware.

Either way: people wanted what they knew, which was Windows, and they paid more for it. I wrote about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41431733

I don't doubt your experience but the linked video emphasizes that the cost for the device with XP was the same $399.

This is from a random contemporaneous TechCrunch article about the 2nd/3rd? gen offerings:

Eee PC 901 (Linux or Windows): $599 Eee PC 1000 (Linux or Windows): $699

https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/13/new-eee-pc-models-get-us-p...

So I checked on the Internet Archive; we sold the EEEPC 900 with Linux for €329, and the Windows EEEPC 901 for €409. The Linux had a Celeron M and the Windows an Atom N270, so I guess I misremember them having identical specs.

I assume the Atom is faster(?) The XP machine felt slower though.