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I don't think Microsoft will produce computers themselves but I could see them come down hard on their OEM partners - "here is the standard, either meet it or lose your OEM discounts". I could see Samsung, Lenovo and maybe Sony making it in the consumer space with Lenovo/HP in the enterprise but Dell is eventually going to die the death of a thousand crappy laptops with faulty batteries. I think going forward OEM contracts will not easily be handed out and the bar set will be a lot higher than in the past.

End of the day the biggest barrier has always been crappy OEM's who compete on price rather than quality - and it is amazing when I hear people on this forum whine that their $400 laptop performs horribly when compared to 'those over priced Mac's' that they whine about. There is a complete lack of connecting the dots by people here as to why their $400 laptop costs $400 or why crapware is installed in the first place or how pricing things cheap is no substitute for making a quality product. I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and wouldn't give it up for anything else on the market - it is a quality product with a price tag that was reasonable. Lenovo made a nice profit off my purchase (which I see nothing wrong with) and I've got a great laptop that works like a charm - we both win and come out better off.

Hi,

I don't think Microsoft have a reason to be more involved in PC hardware. They already control the most relevant standards (e.g. ACPI) and also have a "Windows Logo Program" to entice hardware manufacturers to do what Microsoft wants.

The "fundamental shift" they're talking about is smart phones, tablets, x-boxes, TV/media centers, etc; with hardware probably manufactured by other companies in partnership with Microsoft (and sold with Microsoft's branding, software, vendor lock-in, etc).

The other part of it is likely to be making consumers pay for "cloud", and tying all these devices into an app store model (where Microsoft get a percentage of all third-party software sales).

Basically, make sure Microsoft get a good percentage of the initial hardware sale, then make sure Microsoft get a good percentage of everything after that, then make sure the devices are useless if consumers realise their wallet is being sucked dry. :-)

- Brendan

Man that ThinkPad X1 Carbon is amazing, I'm a proud owner of a T510 and I run Linux on it.

I think the X1 Carbon will be my next laptop.

Sure, MS won't build low margin boxes. BUT they will build high margin premium devices.

Remember MS and Apple won't sue each other anymore, their patents are all basically shared.

For example: MS can easily add a magsafe power connector to surface and ship pinch-to-zoom or that magic trivial scrolling Apple has patented. Other OEMs .. not so much (besides Sony)

I think you're exactly right. I think they're looking at the iOS/OS X and Android models, and they want to go more in that direction. And they can't do that if they're allowing OEMs to ship butchered, mutilated versions of the OS, which produce a sup-par user experience, and a different sub-par user experience per unique OEM at that.
They've wanted to take more configuration control away from OEMs for a long time, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start to become willing to take drastic steps to do it.



I don't think I've ever heard anyone do that on this forum. You're railing against a user who either doesn't exist at all, or is non-representative.

I also find "wise consumers should always spend up for expensive OEM systems" to be completely rediculous.

on that note, a company like HP could always decide to do something revolutionary like reinvent the linux distro. make it compatible with android apps, make their own clones of metro apps (if that crap is good enough for microsoft, it can be done by HP), whatev.

Doubtful it would ever take place - not only because the cash required would be huge but also the legacy of HP not even being able to maintain their own 'in house' operating systems such as HP-UX and OpenVMS to a reasonable level of quality.

You mean like they did with WebOS?

HP aren't interested in software, they're more a hardware company. More so, a hardware company aimed largely at businesses (enterprise servers, business work stations, etc).

Or they could buy a ready-made OS like WebOS and try to put it on printers, tablets, or whatever with it. In fact, they already did just that. It wasn't successful, but any OEM is free to do things like that, and were already free to do it before Ballmer's statements.

"Had big OEMs like HP, Dell, Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo etc spend 0.01% of the money they paid MS over the years on Linux software and application development Linux would be a much better alternative now that they going to need it."

Tee hee... That's what Nokia thought with MeeGo. "Let's partner with other phone makers like Samsung to form the MeeGo aliance and make the OS together". The wrinkle in that plan is that the other manufacturers (Samsung etc) realized Nokia needed MeeGo much more badly that they did (because Nokia wasn't making any Android phones) so they simply laid on their backs and let Nokia do all the work.