Microsoft's plan to extend Windows XP Home licencing for another two years-- but only on ULCPC models that meet the company's exacting specifications -- might seem like a back-flip on its licensing plans, or some kind of desperate attempt to stop Asus selling quite so many Linux-based Eee PCs.

Bluescreen has learned that it actually forms part of a wider Microsoft strategy to embed Windows into everyday devices, and, moreover, to generate sales revenue for parts of the Microsoft business long thought dead.

"XP on the Eee is just the start", our Redmond based source told us. "A couple of years back, we looked at what Hollywood's been doing for the last one hundred years -- take four or five basic story ideas, and then re-use them endlessly through remakes, re-imaginings, and grabbing concepts holus-bolus from the public domain before copyrighting the heck out of them. We'd already done the grabbing public ideas thing to death -- the word processor, the GUI, Internet Explorer, and so on -- but the idea of re-using our old IP sparked an entirely new thought process and business plan."