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Originally Posted by jackau
Well, M$ don't exactly doesn't make hardware, maybe not (yet) in the fields apple has a leg in, the Zune thing is not exactly made by M$, but certainly in other fields.
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Sorry, what?
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The best example is the Xbox 360, which it was designed by M$, their engineers came up with the whole thing and hold all the copyrights to the tech inside it.
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Of course that's a Microsoft product. It's designed by Microsoft and manufactured for Microsoft. That's how all of them do it; there is almost no company in the market which produces its products completely on its own instead of outsourcing the manufacturing process to companies like Foxconn or Quanta(?). Samsung maybe, since they do pretty much everything.
Still, the Xbox 360 and Zune product families are rather exceptions. In most markets, Microsoft delivers the software while others license it for their hardware. After all, Zune was only invented because all previous, Microsoft software-powered DAPs like the ones made by Toshiba sucked. Microsoft had to do it itself in order to succeed. And in game consoles, well ... there is not much use for Microsoft software. So again, Microsoft had to make its own hardware to gain marketshare.
Now it remains to be seen if the tablet market is more like the PC market or more like the embedded markets. If the latter comes true, Microsoft will have to make its own tablet.