It must become a hardware manufacturer to compete with iPad. Is Apple a hardware manufacturer re: the iPad? Do they have chip foundries, LCD plants, manufactur

It must become a hardware manufacturer to compete with iPad. Is Apple a hardware manufacturer re: the iPad? Do they have chip foundries, LCD plants, manufacturing plants? As you know they certainly don't. Samsung, on the other hand, does. They make their own...everything. How is that working out for them? Are they destroying Apple with their profit advantages. It is never so simple. It is actually ridiculously complex, and cargo-cult hand picking of attributes of leaders and losers (while ignoring all of the exceptions) is seldom a useful exercise. Microsoft has the choice of competing with Android on the tablet low end, or of competing with Apple on the tablet high end. Another rather questionable analysis, sorry. The iPad dominates because it's cheap (options like the Xoom have been, perversely, more expensive). In what universe is the iPad the "high end"? Further as prices do move down, Apple most certainly is just as heartily in that competition, and we know that a 7" iPad is not far off. Microsoft needs to make a product that people want. It's as simple as that. Android had faltered on tablets because it was, simply, a terrible tablet OS. It is becoming a very credible contender. Is Windows 8? Time will tell, but I see little to competitively sell it over either ICS or iOS but a lot of hot air and futurist speculation about how Microsoft will somehow leverage their other markets to take over the tablet market (a strategy that has failed miserably for them, but here we are again. How many people actually want Office on a tablet again?)