Sony wins battle over preinstalled Windows in Europe’s top court

> ... the sale by Sony of computers with pre-installed software meets the expectations of a significant proportion of consumers who prefer to purchase a computer already equipped and ready for immediate use, rather than to purchase a computer and software separately.

Since the "significant proportion of consumers" is going to be the same with other brands too, we can assume this is a major victory for M$.

>It's worth noting that the ruling could be bad news for free software, which is rarely offered on new machines.

If "free software" were desirable to consumers, hardware makers would be glad to stop paying for Windows and pass some portion of the savings on to the customer. It's win-win for them. But so few people are willing to do this that it's not in their best interest to offer machines in the additional configurations, even if that only amounts to 1 more (no software) per machine.

I don't even want to think about the support hassles for that scenario, with people simply choosing the cheaper computer and not understanding what they are getting.