Agreed that OEMs should go away.
- the increasing move to *aaS (look at OnLive, for example)
- the reports that MS wants to charge >$60 for Windows RT licenses even on <$500 devices
- the difficulty companies like Google and MS have competing toe to toe with Apple's vertically integrated devices
- the existence of bloatware.
Microsoft knows that Windows 8 has to succeed. Clearly it does not trust Dell, HP, Lenovo et al to build machines that shows the OS in its best light to help it succeed. So long and thanks for all the fish OEMs.
Right now Meg Whitman is probably regretting deep sixing WebOS.
Who could blame them?
Third party laptop vendors have been manufacturing crap for the last decade. The only exception is the thinkpad line(I own one), which mainstream consumers see as ugly. Hardware wise, every other laptop manufacturer has done little to impress or innovate, they're all about two years behind Apple, and any time they try to innovate they have all failed miserably.
On the software side, many of them bloat an excellent Windows 7 with tons of crapware.
I wonder if Microsoft can compete with Apple on the manufacturing side. Apple's manufacturing operations are highly polished and streamlined. While Microsoft, who do manufacture some very decent keyboards, webcams, and other accessories, are relatively inexperienced with manufacturing consumer electronics on a massive scale.
Edit: For Some reason I forgot about Xbox and Kinect. So yes, they do have extensive manufacturing experience, but boy was the Original Xbox a disaster with the RROD.
There's manufacturing consumer electronics and then there's manufacturing consumer electronics profitably.
This is where Apple shines and Microsoft shows that they need to learn a thing or two.
Not only is Apple building far more iPad/iPhone/iPod/Mac than Microsoft is building Xbox, its hardware divisions are profit machines whereas Microsoft makes comparatively little profit on its hardware.
Actually, The entertainment/devices division had a loss of $225 million last quarter.
The original Xbox, the one the MS bureaucracy left alone, was as solid as any other consumer electronics device. The Xbox 360, the one the MS bureaucracy pushed through manufacturing despite known problems solely so they could 'beat' Sony to market, was the disaster.
And that raises an unfortunate concern: did the MS bureaucracy rush this out to 'beat' the heavily-rumored first-party Google tablet?
Because user-acceptance of the schizophrenic OS may still be an open question, but it's not going to be remotely answered if this thing shows up with build problems.
Anyone know anything about this side of Microsoft? I assume the actual fab is done by anonymous Asian companies. How much of the design (nuts and bolts engineering, I mean) is done in-house and how much is contracted to established hardware manufacturers. (i.e. Does Samsung or the like have a piece of this pie?)
That's very unlikely for Google and Motorola. Google needs the market fragmented so that Apple doesn't dominate it. In order to maximize it, they need OEMs making slightly incompatible devices so that de jure standards dominate over de facto ones.