The assessment about Intel was presented as a possibility by one of the readers. It’s just a possibility.

Retailers order whatever stock they want, and the supplier might be able to fill the orders, or it might not. There’s none of this “We’ll increase production of xyz because it’s selling well”; the manufacturer is probably at capacity already or needs to juggle production capability with higher profit lines.

I work at an electrical retailer. Panasonic microwaves are always popular. I have never once rang up to order a Panasonic microwave and found them to be in stock. There was one time when the call-centre guy told me that they were in stock, but in actual fact all the stock was allocated to retailers who already had backorders in the system.

Does Microsoft collude with proxies to keep the supply of Panasonic microwaves low? Of course not. They just have to make as many high-profit plasmas as required, and whatever production capacity is left gets put into microwaves and other low-profit products. If there’s spare cash in the kitty they’ll build a new factory for microwaves, but that could take years.

Asus’ EeePCs are a low-profit line. Asus makes as many Eees as it can without cannabalising stock levels of their higher profit products. If the retailers order loads of XP machines, then the retailers have stock of those. If Asus runs out of XP Eees, it’s likely that they might reappropriate their stock of Linux Eees and install XP on them, causing a shortage of the Linux machines.

SUMMARY:
See? There’s always a simple, acceptable, more-likely-to-be-correct explanation. The XP-based Eees do sell better, unfortunately, so the machines that started life as Linux-based finish their life as XP machines. There’s no Microsoft pushiness in play here. It’s just simple economics. Asus can’t increase production of XP machines at the moment, they can just turn Linux machines into XP ones to fill demand. But I suspect that, even though I’m a reader of this site, that my comments won’t make the basis of a story on your site.

The production of equal numbers of XP and Linux EEEPCs is clearly insane and it also shows the power M$ continues to exert.