Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
However, this is far from bad news. It may mean that we will see a wide variety of riffs on this from each partners perspective: a serious business device, a consumer version, an ultimate portability version, one that converts easily to a desktop when docked, etcetera.
|
The ACER founder thinks MS will fold shop once WinRT and Win8 tablets establish themselves. However, in the past, he has shown himself to be an optimist.
Surface *is* a shot across the bow to the OEMs.
But MS has shown in the past that they will not let their partners determine their fate; not IBM, in the spat turned war over Windows and OS/2; not Intel, who are regularly reminded MS can *always* go out and buy AMD; and not HP or the other OEMs.
Surface is not *just* a reference design; you don't run an all-out media hype event like this week's, putting your company's credibility on the line, just to prod partners--you do it when you are really, really serious.
The message so far is that MS sees an uphill fight for their new Tablet platforms and they will do everything necessary to succeed. They will not handicap *this* generation of tablets by coddling their OEMs. So any OEM partners will have to be either way cheaper than Surface (for comparable features) or way better. Or they'll get runover.
Tough love time.
After all, what can the OEMs do that they haven't *already* done to MS? Android tablets? Buy Palm? RIM?
They gave the OEMs *zero* advanced warning. And the press release made it clear there are other surface products coming: the guessing is a Phone might be next. MS is not going to roll over and play dead for Apple and Google and if fighting back means the OEMs get trampled, well, they get trampled.