>>8
I am afraid that was only a minor influence, if at all (especially back then people installed the latest most bloated crap on anything all the time - "HELP I installed linux on my old pII and firefox runs slow, I have heard linux is fast???")
More influential were probably these two things: 1) Ms decided against availability on earlier windows versions 2) if on xp, to get these from windows update, you had to pass legality check