In the growing netbook market, Microsoft is now leading the race seeing an 86% increase over the 12months, pushing the software making to a dominant position.

As the netbook market continues to grows rapidly, the growth of Windows on netbook PCs has skyrocketed over the past year.

Windows share on PCs in the U.S. went from under 10 percent of unit sales during the first half of 2008 to 96 percent as of February 2009, according to the latest NPD Retail Tracking Service data.

It's hard to believe it's been a year since we first started to see netbook PCs running Windows come to market, said Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft's Windows blogger.

Looking forward to Windows 7, Microsoft has promised that forthcoming new O.S. would run acceptably on netbooks as well. It is unclear if users who purchase netbooks with XP will be offered incentives to upgrade to Windows 7.

Little did we know that these devices would evolve so much in such a short time. A year ago, they were Internet-centric devices defined mainly by their tiny size and low cost. An interesting concept perhaps, but sales didn't really take off until the category evolved into the more capable small notebook PCs we see on the market today. LeBlanc wrote.

The inability of Windows Vista to run on netbooks forced Microsoft to offer very low cost licenses for Windows XP to kill off the threat of Linux finding a foothold on low cost hardware. XP is being kept on by Microsoft as the OS of choice for Ultra-Low-Cost-Portables (netbooks).

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