Summary: This week, Microsoft crossed a line it has maintained for three decades. With its new Surface PCs for Windows 8, it will compete directly with the OEMs who license Windows. Why now? Because those OEMs desperately need a challenge.
Microsoft is not throwing its OEM partners under the bus. It is pushing them out of the way of an onrushing freight train.
See what I did there? I substituted one violent transportation-based metaphor for another. That was deliberate. So was Microsoft’s unprecedented decision to cross a line it has maintained for three decades.
