Working very closely with Nokia will provide Microsoft a more holistic software-hardware design platform and give Microsoft a fair chance to come up with a decent, iPad-level tablet.

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Microsoft, Lenovo, Google, and all the other hardware and software brands that rely on the PC platform are in a world of confusion and uncertainty.

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Although the focus on our services efforts impacted some local software and hardware modifications that were required to be competitive, our product platform and architecture are consistently recognized by the industry as being best-in-class.

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OpenXC platform will transform the car into a plug-and-play platform where interchangeable open-source hardware and software modules that can be quickly and easily customized by developers for specific tasks.

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The platform includes hardware, software and an API.

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Dowling said Pure Networks is sharing its APIs with partners like AOL and D-Link so they can write both agents and applications that leverage the Network Magic platform to the enhance the value of their hardware and software offerings.

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"The Pentium 4 processor will be the fastest desktop platform in the world, " Yu promised an audience of software and hardware developers assembled here.

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"Phone makers can focus on building cooler hardware and new platforms, and save 10% of their software costs" with an open source platform, asserts Rubin.

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VMware aspires to be for data centers what Microsoft is for PCs, both providing a software platform to run web applications (like, for example, Google Docs) and also managing the hardware that powers them.

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