Re: Silly thought experiment
Actually, I believe that what was just described here is a South Korean Chaebol. Samsung, for example, though in Chaebols there wouldn't so much be "4 versions of Windows for the desktop" so much as "desktops would be built by company A, mobiles by company B, cloud strategy by company C, servers by company D".
They're a spectacularly effective means of organizing business and equally as effective at annihilating their competition. Be very careful what you wish for. American equivalents to Chaebols in tech could be considered to be GE, Intel, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and certainly in an emerging capacity, Google*.
Microsoft is a software company. Their forays into hardware are small and insignificant. You'd damned well better pray they don't start making self-driving cars or we are all fucked.
*Replete with killer robots and drones!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
