One word: branding.

Microsoft is not a Big Time Brand, as my friend Rob Frankel would say. It doesn't give most of us the warm fuzzies. It's not a trusting relationship. There's no love there, as there is with Apple or Google.

So while I enjoyed Russell Beattie's brilliant summing-up of the strategy, I am far more confident in Om Malik's competitor sum-up. Look at the left side of Om's chart, then look at the right. Is the right side of the chart going to collapse because the left side is tightly integrated?

Remember what's coming, please. Apples are going to be on the Intel platform next year. That means they'll be just as cheap as Dell machines, maybe cheaper, and more stylish to boot. Google dwarfs what Microsoft is doing online, because they know where their business starts (search).

It's good that Microsoft is understanding where their business starts (the desktop) but just putting extensions on that into others' turf isn't monopoly.

It's not Monopoly 4.0 at all. It's Competition 1.0, competition in the open market and not the boardroom. Real competition based on features, on serving individual customers, on delivering promises, not vapor. (That's David Boies to the left. Boo, Bill!)

Has Microsoft ever won that kind of war? Think back. Microsoft had one great trick, Expanded Memory. This is what let it tell IBM it would no longer support OS/2 and make it stick. That happened in a lab, not in a store.

And the world's a store now. It's all one big store, called the Internet. Most people like having multiple vendors, when they can get them. And Microsoft's brand is simply not strong enough to break through this resistance. Not when there are so many other, better-loved brands out there that would have to be tossed aside in order to enable that.

So while I get the plan, and I understand the desire, the old WinTel monopoly is not going to be put together again. The divorce between Microsoft and absolute market control is final. And for that, Microsoft should be quite thankful.