COMMENT:Microsoft Greed Set To Screw PC Manufacturers
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Microsoft love to dominate and they will walk over cut glass to achieve an objective.

This time the cut glass is their long time PC partners who they are openly looking to strip PC market share away from with their new all singing all dancing laptop and a new two in one Surface Pro 4.

Microsoft’s new marketing scenario goes something like this.

Firstly, they take their stuffed Windows OS model and move it to the cloud.

Then then offer Windows 10 free to Windows 8 and 7 customers, along the way they collect tens of millions of names address plus a vast amount of PC intelligence such as which PC a Windows 10 user is operating.
 
They then move to a new model of their Surface Pro offering which was their first real piece of PC hardware that competed with their PC partners. 

The excuse at the time was that their PC partners were not doing a good enough job of delivering Windows based tablets.

Now they have delivered a new notebook which has a hinge very similar to the highly successful Lenovo Yoga Pro 3.

They have given no reason this time as to why they believed they needed a notebook that will strip share from the likes of ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, HP and Toshiba.
 
Maybe it’s just plain simpler greed and a white hot desire to create major problems for the PC manufacturers who they are already screwing by charging them a licence fee to install a free version of Windows 10 software onto their PC.
 The charge is around $75 which is passed onto consumers by both manufacturers and retailers. 

Once that software is activated its Microsoft and not the PC manufacture who automatically gets information on the new PC owner. 

Microsoft is refusing to share their Windows 10 database information with their so called PC partners. 

A key component of Windows 10 I that consumers have to supply contact information because of “security updates”. 

Microsoft is also set to open their own shop in Sydney that will direct sell their new notebook, all in one PC, Windows 10 smartphones and various other Microsoft hardware, a store is also planned for Melbourne. 

So how long will it be before all those tens of millions of ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, HP and Toshiba customers are being direct mailed by Microsoft and told that they need a new Microsoft notebook, all in one PC or a new Windows smartphone. 
This is not a good situation for the PC industry which is already suffering as consumers switch their PC needs. 

What Microsoft is hoping to achieve is to take the top end of the PC market while forcing their competitors to sell cheap bottom end notebooks.

Two big PC manufacturers are already cuddling up to Microsoft in the B2B market. 

Both Dell and Hewlett-Packard recently cut deals to flog Microsoft hardware.

Microsoft is teaming up with Dell and Hewlett-Packard to sell the company’s Surface Pro tablet to businesses in a move aimed at stripping sales away from the specialist PC channel and mass retailers. 

As part of the partnership, Dell is now using its sales team to hawk the Surface Pro and related accessories directly and shortly, businesses will be able to buy Surface Pros directly from Dell’s website.

Financial details about the deal were not disclosed.

By partnering with other vendors to sell the tablet, Microsoft is trying to make a bigger push with corporate customers who in in the past have purchased their PC products from PC manufacturers partners. 

 Brian Hall, a Microsoft general manager of the Surface product line, told Bloomberg News that big clients have said Microsoft needed to offer better customer support for its Surface Pros before they would buy them in large quantities.

“We have had very large customers saying for you to be a standard for our employees, in the thousands and thousands of devices, we need you to have these capabilities,” said Hall. “They kept saying you are going to have to have support and services capabilities like Dell.”

When Microsoft first introduced the Surface tablet back in 2012, tech analysts took notice of the fact that Microsoft decided to develop its own hardware instead of leaving it to PC makers like Dell and HP. Microsoft reportedly kept plans of its Surface tablet under wraps from its hardware partners before the product was eventually launched. Today’s news seems to indicate that while Microsoft is still making Surface itself, it needs the help of the hardware vendors to make the tablet more business friendly.

No details were given on Hewlett-Packards involvement in selling Surface Pro tablets.
Already several PCC manufacturers have moved to expand sales of Chromebooks that are powered by Google software. Several Pc manufacturers have told ChannelNews that they will shortly offer Chromebooks complete with Free Google Docs, cloud based storage and expanded hardware capability.