HP again swipes at the Wintel model

Are the days of the Windows with Intel inside coming to an end? Larry Walsh scopes out the situation

If you listen to Hewlett-Packard, the days of Wintel domination of the technology market may appear numbered. The numbers and business models are simply against Microsoft and Intel, and - HP says - the tech landscape will look substantially different in 2016.

Sridhar Solur, director of next-gen computing and cloud services at HP, sounded the siren of change at the company's Discover event in Barcelona last week, citing the vast difference in conventional Wintel PCs from mobile devices running alternative processors and operating systems. In 2012, 300 million PCs shipped around the world, compared to three billion mobile devices.

This is not the first time HP has sounded alarms over Microsoft and Intel's future. In October, CEO Meg Whitman (pictured, right) broke the company's silence on increasing competition with Microsoft and Intel products, saying the two longstanding allies were increasingly rivals for future sales.

Prior to Whitman's admission, HP had quietly accepted Microsoft developing products to compete with its PCs and mobile devices, and Intel pushing against its security products through the acquisition of McAfee.

HP isn't alone in its assertion. Acer was the first hardware manufacturer to criticise Microsoft for competing with its OEM partners by releasing devices such as the Surface tablet.

While most PC companies have remained silent here, though, their actions speak differently. Samsung, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP have all released notebooks running Google's Chrome OS. And most have tablets running Google Android.

Solur's remarks are different, though, because they're less about competition and more about the waning relevance of the Wintel platform and model.

He said Microsoft is the only software vendor still selling operating systems; all other OS producers give their code away. And, he said, Intel is reacting to the ARM processor model, and facing stiff competition from upstarts such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia, which are quite different competitors to what AMD was in PC chips.

The shearing away from PCs and toward tablets and wearable competitors, Solur says, could break the Wintel paradigm within the next two years.

"The next wave of computing [will be in] 2016. You're talking about 30bn connected devices. Look at who the players are. This is a total green-field opportunity," Solur said in a recent CNET report.

The year 2013 hasn't been good for Microsoft and Intel. With PC sales declining as much as 11 per cent and server sales falling six per cent, their core products - the Windows OS and x86 processors, respectively - have not sold well.

Microsoft is beginning to see sales of its Surface tablet climb, but it's a long way off from threatening the lead of Apple's iPad or Google Android devices.

Microsoft has taken a lot of heat for launching devices instead of supporting models by its OEM partners, but it wasn't the first to shoot in this battle. In 2010, HP bought Palm for $1.2bn, specifically to get its hands on the WebOS operating system.

In 2011, HP launched its first homegrown tablet, the TouchPad, which ran WebOS, not Windows or Android. It was a colossal failure that led to HP's meltdown and current recovery state.

Don't expect Microsoft to take HP's swipes too hard. Surface sales are rising and it's making plans for expanding its sale of the Windows tablet through channel partners.

Expanding Surface to the channel will probably boost sales and expand its market share against Google and Apple. If sales continue to climb, it could insulate Microsoft against OEM partner shifts to alternative platforms.

We are living in interesting times and there's no sign of them getting boring any time soon.

As part of our special editorial relationship, CRN is republishing this article from Channelnomics