TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Ben Brooks wonders whether Microsoft should make their own PC:

If Microsoft did do this and they decided that they wanted to make the best possible PC — something that competes directly with, say, MacBook Pros — wouldn’t that be an interesting change?

I don’t even think it is a market that Microsoft would have to be making more than 2-3 models of computers to be in just a laptop, desktop, and tablet. All Microsoft would need to do is make the best stuff a Windows user could buy and then sell it with a healthy profit margin. Doing that, by comparison to all other PC makers, would make all others look pretty bad — both to consumers and investors.

HP exited the PC market because it’s a dying market—not only has it peaked and become a commodities business, but the iPad has shown that most people really don’t need a PC at all for what they do. HP realized that sales are going to decline in the next five to ten years and so there was no reason for them to stay in a business that isn’t profitable now and has no future.

Entering the PC business doesn’t make any more sense for Microsoft than it does for HP to remain in it. Even if we look at it purely as a question of whether it can (1) turn a profit and (2) improve the Windows PC image, they shouldn’t. The only possible path to profitability is selling a higher margin, nicely designed PC to Windows users who appreciate it. That’s possible, but they would be doing so (in the best case) at the expense of Lenovo’s Thinkpad line.

What’s the gain for Microsoft? Not much. A bit larger bottom line, at best, and they would be investing a terribly large amount of money, time and focus into a dying business.

Building a tablet, though, is a different question, and an idea that makes more sense for Microsoft to do. At the moment, Microsoft believes that “post-PC” really means “PC plus touch”—that their original tablet PCs are where we’re going to end up. That certainly isn’t a view point supported by the market, so they have a lot to prove. If they can build a tablet running Windows 8 that does everything we want a post-PC device to do, they certainly stand to benefit from it, because they would make their concept viable.

I don’t think that’s how they’re going to play it, though, because Microsoft is deluded about the future of computing. Whereas Apple sees the post-PC and PC as separate markets, Microsoft wants to believe that the tablet is another PC, and thus they can gain market share by selling them as such. They figure that they already have the vast majority of the market for PCs, so if they just conveniently make new PCs tablets, too, people will buy them just as they’ve bought every other PC they’ve ever owned. And if that’s the plan, there’s no way they’re going to build their own.