Yesterday at a press conference Microsoft and HP announced their collaborative effort on People-Ready Business Building. This covers many aspects of enterprise solutions from CMS, messaging, infrastructure, and other areas. This signifies a major partnership between the two companies.

Some History

About 5 years ago, Dell quickly rose to prominence in the server arena, before that the leader was Compaq (now owned by HP). Dell had offered an extensive and successful laptop line. But recently over the past three years Dell has been reluctant to expand into other areas like the Table PC market, and a small effort into the PDA market. Most recently Dell has made the decision to offer Blu-ray drives in their laptops starting with the M1710. Microsoft has made a big investment in HD DVD with the Xbox, and other areas.

Bring in HP

HP announced last year that they plan on supporting HD DVD in their laptops. Most recently HP is offering the hd 100 External HD DVD ROM drive. Historically HP has been gadget friendly and willing to offer Microsoft products that Dell did not, HP has the successful Ipaq (which was acquired when they purchased Compaq), they were also early out of the gate to offer Tablet PCs.

Dell has a huge portion of the consumer and enterprise markets in the PC and laptop sectors, but HP is making inroads on gaining some of that back. With Dell offering Blu-ray drives in their laptops, you can bet that HP will be rushing to offer HD DVD drives in theirs very soon. Make no doubt about it, HD DVD versus Blu-ray is a battle, kind of like Betamax versus VHS, but even bigger. And with Dell computers in the mix it should be an interesting one to watch in 2007.

Another area of interest is this budding relationship between HP and Microsoft, and the waning between Microsoft and Dell. Where will this go in 2007?