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Comment by Zirro | Hacker News Reader

Finally. One of the major reasons I use Apple-products today is that the hardware and software works together out of the box, which creates the feeling that they were made for each other.

With clunky PCs, I've never experienced that feeling. Hopefully Microsoft can get it right this time, and make it feel like a quality product. While I enjoy using my Apple devices a lot, they do need some competition to fuel innovation.

If Microsoft manages to pull this off the right way, with a feeling of great quality to it, I could even see myself buying one to try out Windows 8 properly.

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This would burn so many bridges with their hardware manufacturers that some would defect and go with some other platform almost immediately.

Microsoft thinks they're the king of the hill with Windows but it wouldn't take long for vendors to team up together and make Chrome OS, Android, or some other Linux variant into a viable alternative.

All this alternate OS would have to do is everything that Windows XP does. The number of Windows 7 specific applications is shockingly low.

Disagree. The hardware manufacturers aren't exactly rolling in high quality operating systems to choose from. What are their other choices? Linux. Many will of course argue that Linux is great and is an obvious choice, which would be a fair enough argument, but for the larger majority of the population who know Windows and don't want to learn something new, the manufacturers will need to stick with Windows or risk alienating those potential customers.

Also, the argument is predicated on the assumption that this is a zero sum game. Microsoft's value proposition isn't suddenly going to be so amazing that no consumer will purchase a non-Microsoft PC. In the same way, I find it highly likely that if Apple's OS were available for licensing, a lot of PC manufacturers would license it without regard for the fact that Apple's hardware is probably superior.

Microsoft's strength in the tablet space is anything but assured. People don't use proprietary Windows applications on them. They're not expecting to run high-end accounting packages or SQL Server or do .NET development.

It's not even clear what Microsoft's value proposition is in this new space.

If you look at applications on the iPad and Android, only a small portion of them are what you might term conventional by desktop standards.

I know this is not really plausible but I wish this would make some manufacturers switch to Ubuntu or some other Linux distro.

Funny how I always had that "it just works" feeling from the machines I build and never got the same feel from any brand available. This feeling is also helped by being able to choose the hardware at the time of build and not some middle of the road to high end options given by a manufacturer that simply overprices said "options" and makes wild claims about it. Plus, I always find it a joy to know the machine down to the bolt and not having to fall back on weird care guarantees. With the exception of servers that have to be serviced by a third party because of scale and time economy, this simply works for me. I don't see how microsoft can one up that, but hey, you never know. Hope it at least allows for some people to try it.

I'm glad it works for you, as I remember back when I felt that way, but at this point I am done with building my own machines.

As a counterpoint, I'm always wondering which part on my self-built machine is going to fail or is failing, and whether I can do anything about it aside from junk the part in question. (I imagine the weird care guarantees for individual parts are weirder still than such as a 1 yr mfg warranty.)

Meanwhile, as a concrete example, neither of the Win7 machines I've built will sleep properly, and troubleshooting PC hardware issues is near the bottom on the list of ways I want to spend my free time.

I sort of miss having the time do to do that stuff. I have respect for those people that enjoy it. But it's so not for me anymore.

And if successful, they could wipe out all of their hardware partners. I doubt Windows 8 is going to be very successful, though. Most people will not see "Metro" as "Windows", and in the tablet space they will have to start from scratch, like everyone else.

If all they do is wipe out all their partners' tablet business, I would not call it a success. How much money would that make them?

I would call it a success if they carved out a new, larger (in dollars) market elsewhere, ideally, but not necessarily, without standing on the toes of their hardware partners.

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