Day by day, Microsoft's operating system becomes free. Android's dominance forced Microsoft to make Windows Phone free. Chromebooks' popularity forced Microsoft to remove the Windows license for low-cost computers.
Windows
is now a burden for hardware manufacturers: its license is a
significant part of the computer's price and Windows 8 doesn't drive
sales. Desktop operating systems are becoming less important, computers
use less power and offload processing to the cloud.
A desktop
operating system built around a browser and a mobile operating system
built around openness made Google the obvious choice for Microsoft's
OEMs. Two timely solutions that allowed companies like Samsung, Asus,
HTC to come up with products people wanted to buy. Hardware companies
usually don't write great software, so Google wrote some of the software
and freed them from Windows. And now the popularity of the Windows-free
products powered by Google made Windows free.
