Re:See! (Score 1, Interesting)

Whoa there, don't you believe it. MS wants Windows at the hardware level because that's where they exercise control of the platform. MS (with Intel) sets the rules of the game for hardware (bus, graphics, sound etc. etc.) and vendors write their drivers to those rules --- for windows. No other OS is able to support newly released hardware because of this. The vendors almost universally don't write drivers for other OSs and third party support (e.g. the linux kernel) always lags behind (when free) or is a delay, risk and cost burden for box builders (e.g. Asus) that cancels out savings on OS licences. It's a major factor against preinstalled linux --- naive users can't safely buy new hardware for those boxes. Look at the state (until very recently at any rate) of cheap webcams on linux.