HP wants to bypass bits of Vista

Apple has never been good at low-margin products, so no worries there.

The real competition is coming from Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Chinese manufacturers. They have no big egos, just a pragmatic profit motive. They feel no loyalty towards Microsoft: they will quite happily embrace Linux if it lets them churn out cheap, easy-to-use machines that the great non-Windows-savvy masses will snap up in their millions.

be really afraid if Apple entered that segment, they would be teabagged by his holyness and his homies. :3

Vista really does need reprogramming with an axe.

C'mon, you're slipping. HP already owns several high availability OSes, plus the large pool of talent in that arena. They could VERY easily do it, but the HP managers are sissy boys and are afraid of offending someone, Microsoft? Besides, it's a lot easier just being a reseller of beige boxes and focusing on a simple, brainless line of printers than something as risky as an OS. Why work to earn your outrageous profits when you can just sit back and watch the money flow in? Oh, and don't you HPers write in and try to tell us how hard you work. The only effort you have to focus on is internal politics.

"Since Vista is clunky and contains things that many users don't want or need, HP thinks that by getting rid of the bloat, Vista will go a lot faster on the notebooks that HP peddles"

They aren't trying to create a new OS, just trying to streamline Vista for certain uses, pretty good idea really and fairly easy with tools like vlite etc...

they are not trying to do anything! its bloatware. Come on this are the same guys that give you a 2gb printer driver, okay i exaggerated a lot. But if you put it in perspective, any hp/compaq machine has to much bloatware. Its hard to believe this same company has deep roots in computing history and now cant even make decent drivers. They have the potential, but they would rather screw us. What are the chances they trim the fat of?

The irony is that Vista is the latest in the Windows NT family, which was created by David N Cutler, who in an earlier life at DEC created VMS. NT shares many design features with VMS, mostly internal stuff, which distinguish it from the older Unix that Linux is based on. Compaq bought DEC and HP bought Compaq, and Carly laid off most of the VMS experts left. So VMS languishes as a legacy for the remaining customers who demand it, including many banks. Yet it's rock-solid and is even now portable, after being ported from VAX to Alpha and then Itanic.

Linux is a fanbois toy, and sells well based on price, but for various reasons I'm not convinced that it can ever have much of a desktop market share. I wonder if HP's OS expertise has been too gutted to challenge Bill.

"Phil McKinney, chief technology officer in HP's PC division said that punters wanted insanely simple technology where they don't have to fight with the technology to get the task done."

They're talking about Apple and OSX then right?

HP, OS?

My God that will be awful. I recently spent 18 months supporting HP pc for a manufacturing company.

Never before have I seen so many blue screens. They are one of the worst at building desktop and laptop PCs, so I'd expect nothing but the worst from a OS that they mess with.

Maybe they should just use XP?

HP wanting to 'slim down' Vista, whilst no bad thing, is a little ironic considering they regularly churn out 350mb+ printer drivers full to the brim with rubbish...