My understanding is that Xandros teamed up with Viyya Technologies to create the most awesome and unique internet search experience. The search engine throws away the junk websites and concentrates on what the viewer is looking for, giving a competitive edge in the work, home, and entertainment environments. Instead of getting 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 responses to a search with 99.9999999999999999999999999999% irrelevance, you will get only what you are looking for, eliminating the need to look through useless websites and refining searches until you find what you are looking for hours or days later. Remember folks, something for free does not save you or your company money. The proper management of time is what saves money. Xandros and Viyya Technologies have the tools available to save you and your company time and money. And you can take that to the bank.

Oh look, another person who seems to lose rational thought when there's a vague mention of Microsoft.

True, Xandros' strength is that they've got a very good link-up with Asus and their Eee range of low-cost computers. If they lose that, then they're probably toast.

It's a big "if" though.

A competing distro would have to take its place, and it would have to be better in the eyes of Asus (and, as such, in the eye of the non-techy Linux user), and I have no problems with the better distro winning.

Unfortunately distro politics start to get in the way - what about patents? What about MP3 support? The version of XMMS that came with Ubuntu 6.x was the Debian version, and that lacked MP3 support due to Debian's self-imposed rules.

What good is a music player without MP3 support in this day and age?

And don't get me started on the codecs required for mplayer...

And as for Eee Xandros aping Windows.... you haven't really used it, have you? The simple desktop is just a standard icon-driven menu system, the sort of which we've all seen over the past twenty years. The full desktop is KDE.

I'm not saying that Xandros is the best Linux distro out there, but the Eee version is bloody good.

From ?Netherlands, Xandros is ZOMFEAR Group & Very Poor. Xandros Doctor being enraged Clown that emails 40 page Flames Demanding entire contents be read or ?else. 
Its Lady Down block in Xandros, of course & BAD Attitude extends into "Their" O/S. 
Its small in size,too & therefore of Little Real Use. thank God they arn't Allowed into Normal O/s quality Market, We'd have 200 Children Climbing fence every Night.
drashek

That's one way you can view it. Both parties pretty much signed their own death warrants when it came to Microsoft's Patent Covenant. (aka: Patent Extortion Racket through fear...Remember Steve Ballmer's magic number? 235 possible patent infringements? Where are they? What are they?).

Xandros/Linspire are being largely ignored and disliked at the same time. That's a double whammy, as it means that very few people will actually use their products. So they have to imitate MS's OEM tactic with system builders.

It may get worse for Xandros, as there is word going around that ASUS engineers have started talking to Debian folks directly via mailinglists, etc. (something to do with setting up pretty infrastructure with EeePC line?).