The news broke early this month in an interview between Laptop Magazine and MSI's director of US Sales Andy Tung that Linux netbooks are returned four times as often as ones that run Windows XP.

Tung said research showed the reason for this is because consumers are turned on by the low price tag of netbooks - which stands to reason, they are low-end subnotebooks - but are turned off by the operating environment being something different than what they are used to.

My esteemed colleagues commented on this. Alex Zaharov-Reutt asked "Have consumers spoken and said 'Linux sux'?" while Sam Varghese countered with, "Does Linux suck or is it lusers who suck?"

I wouldn't necessarily criticise the ordinary folk who are frightened by a computing device which doesn't conform to their existing experiences, but there definitely is a lesson to vendors - and indeed tech journalists - about helping better manage expectations of the buying public.

A netbook is cheap and part of the reason for this is because it avoids "the Windows tax," namely, the licensing fee that Microsoft Windows mandates.

And, of course, as delightful as any hardware made by Apple is, the price is way out of netbook range.

Yet, there is a bright future ahead, and it's due to something that Google picked up on and is one of the key reasons they cited a need for their recent Chrome web browser.

Let me tell you about it.