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Comment by fatbird | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I speculate with colleagues on what replaces Windows in businesses in five years, it's a Dell or HP machine that's just monitor, keyboard and mouse, running an upsized version of Android that accesses a cloud based office suite. That would keep me up at night, at MS.

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If it runs office, they'll still make their dime on it.

Ah and look what we have here: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3612422/microsoft-office-m...

They might still do ok on the corporate desktop. Windows rt is competitive with android in functionality and price (when you look only at the sort of tablets corporations would buy.) The lack of apps is not a showstopper for tablets that will be locked down anyway.

Also, the PC market is getting replaced largely with tablets, so PC vendors who aren't big players in the tablet space face an uphill battle. HP is done for. Dell has some tablet expertise, and betting on windows 8 is smart in case it succeeds, but they will have to fight hard to not be driven out of the market by asus, samsung and google.

Replacing Office is really the fatal blow, and that's where I wonder when we'll see someone like Dell or HP selling a cheap, business class iMac-like running Android on Arm in an effort to restore margins on high volume business channel sales. The obvious drop-in replacement in that case is Google Apps, and I'm sure Google would be happy to partner with an OEM to develop such a complete device.

The trick there is that the OEM needs to feel like MS won't or can't crush them. The aura of invulnerability of MS has to be broken, and when I look at the extended pratfall that is Windows phone and tablet, I can't help but think that OEM execs are feeling a bit drooly.

Aside from the collaboration functionality which is now present in Office 2013, Google Apps is about where Office was in 2000. It has a long way to go before it is a suitable replacement for anything except the simplest business uses.

Businesses in 2000 managed just fine with that version of Office; as an occasional user at work I don't really see what's changed since then.

The display as a vector seems natural to me too.

I wonder though: with the new mini android pc's(starting at $35)[1] that you can connect to your HDMI, even just a simple bundle and some marketing and maybe some playing with the software could be parts of interesting experiments by display vendors or some other company.

And then part of scaling this process , it might make sense to integrate android into the display.

[1]http://9to5google.com/2013/01/01/mk802-mini-android-pc-for-3...

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