Microsoft to Sell PCs, Starting in India 233
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?"
Re:Emulating Sun and Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Zenith? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Customer Wins! (Score:2, Informative)
Finally they will know how we feel when we call them for support.
Re:Good for them... (Score:1, Informative)
On a serious note, the main hindrance to Microsoft's ideas seems to be the hardware/OEM market, since this is still a market, with incredibly slim profit margins, which forces its players to do things customers actually want (ie. many companies are still selling XP on computers, some having previously ditched XP are even reintroducing it, since that is what their customers are demanding. Along with Linux of course (but I think this may just be part of a more long-term plan by the OEMs to make sure Microsoft has less totalitarian control over them after the outrageous demands they were subjected to over Vista)). If Microsoft enters it and uses its OS fortunes to severely undercut their PC models (in the name of charity, of course) then they could potentially gain control of this market too. Then any 'feature' they want can be introduced without any objection from people they care about (this doesn't include users, obviously), ie. put 'treacherous computing' modules in every machine, set up hardware limitations to force subscription based software, etc.
As a student I have access to Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 (or whatever the latest one is) for no cost, but I just deleted the email telling me this without a second thought because I'm not going to fall for that trap (if I wiped over the Windows XP copy I paid for with my computer in favour of the numerous Free Software systems I've tried over the years then I'm not exactly going to ditch it and go back to Windows). In hindsight I probably shouldn't have deleted it right away, since I could quote from it, but it's not too big a loss. I am, however, promoting Free Software to students in my University, and spent a day leafletting against Vista the day before it came out (urging people to stay with what they have, but if they really want a brand new system then check out Linux first, then Mac). The main argument? Vista is free for you, but Free Software is free for you, your friends, your family, your children, your employer, etc. Also just the sheer diversity of the software available, which easily defeats the "Free software? OpenOffice is crap" argument with the thousands of programs available for every little thing imaginable on a computer that makes their lives easier (molecule modelling and analysis tools for chemists, etc.).
Re:Wintel? (Score:4, Informative)
Apple has nothing to do with this, Intel is fairly opportunistic and they see there is a significant potential for Linux growth over the next few years and having Intel hardware be the hardware of choice due to superior driver support can only help them. They have traditionally provided fairly good hardware support for Linux on the server side of things for obvious reasons, it appears that this is now being pushed out to more desktop/notebook oriented hardware. Most likely in anticipation of desktop Linux growth, especially in the corporate/government universe.
.html [pbs.org]
As far as a MS/Intel alliance, there has not been one to speak of for several years now. It's not that Intel is above collusion or dirty tricks, for example there was that deal they struck with Skype a while back trying to get Skype crippled on AMD processors. It's just that Intel, and many other hardware companies have felt for years that Microsoft is holding them back.
From Microsoft's perspective they have been in a position where most computer users in the world have to pay them a "Microsoft tax" if they want to or not, so the less things change the better because any radical hardware or usage changes (the internet) can only hurt Microsoft rather than help them. This clashes with the goals of most hardware companies, which are to one-up the other hardware companies and crank out new hardware revisions constantly to keep people in the habit of upgrading every year. Graphics processor capabilities have been advancing at an incredible rate the last few years, this is largely because gamers are constantly looking at upcoming games and thinking to themselves "man I'm going to need a new video card when that comes out". What would be an equivalent event for replacing the rest of the hardware in the computer? Perhaps the release of a new operating system, though this doesn't really work when it takes Microsoft 5 years and lots of delays between each version of Windows with only marginal changes, most of which have scared the corporate/government customers away from upgrading.
There has been bad blood between Intel and Microsoft for many years now, if you want further evidence here is an interview from late 2005 with Avram Miller Intel's "Vice President and Director of Corporate Business Development" from 1984-1999 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/008
Here is an example from another former Intel executive who testified against Microsoft in the anti-trust trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_McGeady [wikipedia.org]