Taiwan's Acer has been on a tear recently. The company gobbled up Gateway quite a while back and has been a top maker of red-hot netbook PCs so far this year. The PC maker has now said that it will be featuring Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) 's Android operating system on future netbooks as an alternative to what it ships on most of its netbooks -- Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) aging Windows XP operating system.The difference here is that while Microsoft XP still may cost a little to Acer and all other PC makers circulating netbooks on the market, Android is a freely-available, open-source product. Acer won't pay a dime for each copy of Android in installs on its netbooks, which -- interestingly enough -- may be the first real head-to-head equitable competition between Google and Microsoft.
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