Microsoft to Sell PCs, Starting in India

kripkenstein writes "According to an Ars Technica report Microsoft will begin selling complete PCs, for the first time in the company's history. The program is aimed at customers in India. 'Dubbed the IQ PC, the machines will cost RS21,000 (about $525), are manufactured in partnership with Zenith, and will sport AMD Athlon CPUs. ... In some ways, the move to sell hardware is a natural extension of Microsoft's low-cost Windows initiative ... It may also be a response to projects like Intel's Classmate PC and the OLPC XO.' The Ars Technica summary is careful to state that they seriously doubt this will lead to Microsoft selling PCs in the US, yet the question must be asked: After Microsoft mice and keyboards, then the XBOX and Zune, Microsoft is increasingly becoming a hardware vendor. Is it only a question of time before Microsoft starts to compete directly with the likes of Dell and HP?"

Comments

Emulating Sun and Apple

[Ngarrang]

Sun and Apple have made quite a good bit of business with this model. I am more surprised that Microsoft did not try this years ago.

Re:Emulating Sun and Apple

[shaitand]

'Sun and Apple have made quite a good bit of business with this model. I am more surprised that Microsoft did not try this years ago.'

I'm not, Microsoft's profits have dwarfed those of Sun and Apple combined and have relied on NOT doing this. Don't you think Microsoft selling PC's without paying themselves any licensing costs is going to have the likes of Dell and HP jumping the Microsoft ship faster than you can blink?

You would have to be crazy to promote windows when Microsoft has an inside edge on windows that assures nobody will have a computer that runs as well as those from Microsoft. Microsoft can do anything they want, including intentionally altering windows in ways that will cause it to misbehave on competitor hardware. This is a conflict of interest so glaring that is insane.

MS might get away with India... or not if the hardware companies are bright. But if MS takes this very far you will see a great deal more HP and Dell support for Linux and customization of Linux to work perfectly with their own hardware.

For Years Microsoft has been neutral to OEM's

[number6x]

For Years Microsoft has been neutral to OEM's. Could this move drive a further wedge between leading PC vendors and MS?

Is it a sign that Microsoft understands it cannot require OEM's to stop from selling alternate OS's and must enter the PC market itself?

Or is MS just licensing its brand name to go on the outside of the computer and making money for very little cost (something MS is good at)?

long term....

[apodyopsis]

Will this prompt the big manufacturers to ship more Linux PCs?

The natural suspicion is that this will eventually lead to whole PCs elsewhere in the world and not for just academics/students. Long term Dell, Gateway and the crowd should be eyeing this carefully I should think.

The writers may doubt it, but even in the FA "..if Microsoft sees success in India, similar partnerships may be forged in other emerging markets".

anti-piracy commoditization

[Speare]

It's simple, really. If the market doesn't see software as a product, but rather sees software as inseparable or an ephemeral customization of the hardware "appliance," then the only way to make a profit on software is to bundle it and make profits on the hardware it's installed.

Rarely do people copy a completed MS Word installation from one machine to another. They copy an installer. If there's no installer, there's one piracy vector down. If all the machines have equal deployed software images, that's another piracy vector down. However, if all the machines are alike, but some don't come with the Office and some do, will they start to copy those post-install files and try to get them to work anyway?

Well

[also-rr]

Given that Dell has started selling Ubuntu, and Intel has written real OSS 3D drivers for it's hardware (along with decent wifi drivers, making laptop support trivial for many, many people) maybe they think that any goodwill which previously kept them out of the hardware business is no longer an issue.