This is actually pretty irrelevant news. Microsoft is beating a dead horse by killing the business model (open hardware) which brought them to prominence . The Desktop market is dead anyway. Most consumer already use only hand held devices and cloud for their computing needs. Handheld devices are largely vendor locked (vendor supplies both hardware and OS) just like computers in 70s and 80s were locked.
Microsoft has lost the hand held device battle without firing a shot (they have never put anything worth using anyway). I am not up to date with the situation on the cloud front but IIRC situation from a year ago they were positioning themselves nicely. It looks that Microsoft Hyper-V has also some serious following even though ESXi is still the guy to beat. In spite of Red Hat hype with RHEV I think that Xen being used by Amazon and few other major cloud players is very well positioned on the market as well.
Open hardware server market is also getting scary. There was just a thread on the FreeBSD forum regarding firmware updates for Sun machines and it turns out not only evil Oracle but all vendors IBM, HP with exception of DeLL have locked their hardware and provide firmware updates only to their customers. That might be also too little to late as most small to medium shops like mine use OEM Supermicro servers and similar.
What is left for us Geeks to do? Well I am sincerely hopping that we are less than a year from open hardware really usable ARM multi processor server and desktop motherboards. There will be vendors like Raspberry
Pi who will try to vendor lock that market as well but I think that due to poor quality of their craftsmanship they ultimately be defeated or unable to completely lock the market.
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