In general I think it is an interesting idea. There has always been an economic issue with hardware manufacturers who were unwilling to expose too much informat

In general I think it is an interesting idea. There has always been an economic issue with hardware manufacturers who were unwilling to expose too much information in an open source driver, and security issues of running a binary blob at ring level 0 in the kernel. Microsoft puts itself in the middle of that by certifying a driver through a vendor sign up / certification process, and since it doesn't require the vendor to release source, the vendor can keep that information secret. As a result you have more drivers for more hardware created under the "Made for Windows" driver development plan than you do from enthusiastic reverse engineering efforts in the Linux camp. To the extent that you can capture the value of Microsoft's oversight without having to pay the 'tax' of a Microsoft OS, you add value for the end users.