Microsoft to buy Dell?

Update: Microsoft buys Dell: April Fools!

The news that Microsoft is to buy Dell, which should become official at the beginning of April, comes as no big surprise. Dell hasn't been doing that well recently, and the global economic downturn is certainly contributing to its woes.

Few companies are prepared to splash out on new hardware when money is tight, especially without a clear indication that it really will run the latest version of Windows in a satisfactory way. Until now, this has been an ongoing guessing game with each new release - will the months of hardware R&D pay off and bring true synergy to the platform paradigm? Even the best have been getting it wrong - remember the outrage at HP when it discovered that the graphics hardware requirements had changed a few months before the release of Vista? You might think Vista simply sucked, but deeper analysis shows this is an over-simplistic analysis of the situation. It was a lack of synergy that made all the difference.

PC Pro: Blogs & Analysis