Microsoft doesn't sell laptops to OEMs, and none of these companies is buying anything from Microsoft, so I don't see what Microsoft has to do with it. If they have lost their original supplier, for whatever unstated reason, there are dozens of Asian white box PC makers who will ship whatever you like, at low prices....
Perhaps the market is just too small to make financial sense, or these Dutch shops have no money.
I used the Wayback machine to have a look at the products and the results are not too exciting. For example, a year ago, the 1.9kg Mingos LT-13-2 laptop had a 1.3GHz Pentium, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive for €540.00 ($708) with Ubuntu.
I can't see how any rational person would buy that, even if they were totally clueless, rabid anti-Microsoft fanboys. It's not like installing Ubuntu is hard ...
Perhaps the market is just too small to make financial sense, or these Dutch shops have no money.
I used the Wayback machine to have a look at the products and the results are not too exciting. For example, a year ago, the 1.9kg Mingos LT-13-2 laptop had a 1.3GHz Pentium, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive for €540.00 ($708) with Ubuntu.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120603005911/http://www.mingos....
I can't see how any rational person would buy that, even if they were totally clueless, rabid anti-Microsoft fanboys. It's not like installing Ubuntu is hard ...
This whole thing makes no sense.