Notice who makes all the money - the vast bulk of profits in the "PC industry" are made by MS. Whilst hardware increases in capability and plummets in price month after month, the cost of DOS/Windows keeps going up with each bug fix release. HP gets a huge chunk of its profits from selling ink, its printers/imaging division accounts for over 40% of its net profit for 2009. That is why Dell has got into the lucrative ink market by selling its own printers. Whilst hardware has long been commoditised and thus offer little to negative profits, MS through its ruthless interoperability (read, lack of) has managed to avoid commoditising Windows and hence makes as much or more profit than the rest of the PC industry combined.