Microsoft: Surface Tablet May Alienate OEM Partners

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 27, 2012 @11:10AM from the damn-the-torpedoes dept.

HangingChad sends this excerpt from PCMag: "Microsoft this week admitted that its upcoming Surface tablet might hurt its relationships with PC maker partners. As first noted by the New York Times, Redmond said in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that 'our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform.'" The filing also made note of the difficulties in building up another app marketplace: "In order to compete, we must successfully enlist developers to write applications for our marketplace and ensure that these applications have high quality, customer appeal and value. Efforts to compete with these application marketplaces may increase our cost of revenue and lower our operating margins."

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Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple by jhoegl · 2012-07-27 11:28 · Score: 4, Interesting

Your logic is pretty flawed on the matter.
What is at issue is the hardware, not the OS.
Microsoft wants to develop their own hardware, that is fine. But who controls the UEFI restrictions? What club do hardware and OEM manufacturers have to belong to now to conform?
With Windows 8's added requirement to conform to this standard, hardware will have to go through testing with MS, which historically has not been that great.
Well now, MS holds the reigns on competitor hardware as well as its own. So... where does that lead the industry?
They can either conform and deal with what is dealt, or find alternatives.
We already see that Apples Developers are leaving due to this "controlled" approach, so what will happen to hardware?
Personally, i think the next 10 years of computing will be very interesting or very depressing.