Abandon, no. But they can be expected to push back a bit more on decrees and pressure from Redmond that they not push Linux/Android as equal citizens. Acer pr

Abandon, no. But they can be expected to push back a bit more on decrees and pressure from Redmond that they not push Linux/Android as equal citizens. Acer probably has less lattitude in this regard, but HP and Dell have non-trivial inroads to Microsoft's (very profitable) enterprise customers. And if they start building and shipping Linux-based servers that plug into the MS infrastructure they're already supplying, at massively less cost [1], Microsoft's entire fallback plan of milking the enterprise into the sunset (going IBM) is under threat. [1] Consider an opensource Sharepoint replacement that has all the Exchange/Office/Active Directory integration. HP has the staff and resources to make that happen, given that they can deliver any and all windows plugins necessary to support the edge cases. Or even linux-based web and database servers that play well with an otherwise-MS enterprise.