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Commodity hardware, as we know it, grew up on the back of Windows. As MS transitions into their "lifestyle" phase, what will the effect of a reduction in crapwa

Commodity hardware, as we know it, grew up on the back of Windows. As MS transitions into their "lifestyle" phase, what will the effect of a reduction in crapware have on the prices of components for everyone else? If a significant number of component purchasers exit the market, the cost of iterating new technology will go up and we'll see prices go up or the rate of technological increase go down (or both).

zvrba 14y ago
Hardware became commodity because of abudnance of mass-produced cheaper IBM clones (producers of "IBM PC-AT compatibles"). Harwdware "grew up" thanks to the innovation by the big guys: IBM, Intel, Apple, [even MS] etc, and their products have always been more expensive. But innovation happened, even though the money didn't go to them when people bought cheap clones. Therefore, I believe that the "purchasers who will exit the market" never were in the market in the first place, and innovation rate won't be affected. I think that the only thing that will happen is better HW/SW quality for buyers of quality brand names. Windows will (hopefully) evolve much quicker [heck, maybe even cheaper!] given that it won't have to support legacy crapware any longer. Windows PCs will probably become slightly more expensive, but that's the price I'm willing to pay for not having to deal with crapware. Users unwilling to pay the price of quality will still be able to run Linux. I wonder whether MS is doing any research on application sandboxing and controlling information flow, possibly from within a lightweight hypervisor. (Singularity project may have been a step in this direction.) It is THE missing piece in Windows infrastructure. Switching users to do different tasks is still very cumbersome, even with a fast machine.