Microsoft not having a significant presence in the mobile, and will increasingly become problem as mobile devices become more powerful. You can already get a mobile phone that attaches to a
screen/keyboard dock. You can attach a
keyboard dock to an iPad. The line between laptops and mobile devices is starting to blur. If a mobile device gets powerful enough to do the basics well, browsing, word processing, image editing, even the desktop becomes less significant. :shrug: HP have seen where the money lies (software/apps) and 'that it is pulling the plug on its tablets and smartphones and preparing to abandon the personal computer market altogether'.
I can see many family homes having say one desktop/server and they access that through mobile phones/pads, which can have keyboard/screens attached, as in the links above, and can plug into, or connect wirelessly, to the TV. If that were to be the future, then HP's decision looks a wise one.
People like consistency, which is why Apple's computer sales are thriving on the back of the iPod/iPhone/iPad successes. Windows 7 looks nothing like Microsoft's mobile OS, but I think I read a few months ago that their future computer OS will look similar to the mobile version.
Both Apple and Microsoft are wary of Google. I think for mobile devices at least, their OS not being tied to their own devices, and also having different versions, will harm their chances of being a 'must have' when buying. At the moment, the hardware sells the mobile device, not the OS, though the OS is slowly becoming more important, especially when there may be similar phones (aren't they all touchscreen now?

) with little feature differences apart from the OS. :shrug:
The problem I have with Google is their aims of making everything in 'the Cloud'. It's great for the company, but not for the individual imho. Having to rely on a network connection of some description to do some simple things, and rely on someone to keep your data secure, is not a good idea. They are not the only ones with that aim though, Adobe and Microsoft would rather you pay as you use, rather than have their software on your computer. Hopefully people will rebel against these plans, but in the 'app world' we live in, people may increasingly not see 'the cloud' model as a problem. :shrug:
Sorry for the ramble, but I'm bored.
