When Microsoft employee, Brandon LeBlanc announced that Microsoft ruled the netbook world, he was exaggerating, shall we say, just a wee bit. I was going to stomp on him but Chris Kenyon of Canonical, the business that stands behind Ubuntu, beat me to it.

LaBlanc opened by claiming that almost all netbooks sold today are sold with Windows. Well, no, not really. The numbers LaBlanc cites are from NPD’s sales survey. NPD focuses on brick-and-mortar U.S. sales, not overall sales. Notice how many Linux systems you see at Best Buy? NPD numbers say a lot more about retail channel sales than it does over-all sales. Besides, as Canonical’s director of business development Kenyon wrote, “However here is an interesting fact–when customers are offered choice on equally well-engineered computers around a third will select Ubuntu over XP.”

Kenyon was talking about the Dell Mini 9, one of the best netbooks out there. Besides, as Jay Lyman an analyst at The 451 Group points out there are other problems with NPD’s numbers when you take them out of their U.S. retail context. First, the United States only has about 20% of the netbook market, and, second, the global market is still 30% Linux. I wouldn’t start the victory parade quite yet if I were Microsoft.

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