Sources: Microsoft And Barnes & Noble To Announce Tablet With Xbox Live Streaming Tomorrow
There's a ton of speculation around what Microsoft will be announcing on Monday in Los Angeles. Both the Wrap and ATD claim the event will showcase a Microsoft built Windows RT/Windows 8 tablet.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before Microsoft's confirmed Los Angeles hardware event, the rumor mill has split into two camps: an insider report that Microsoft is building its own tablet to rival Apple's iPad, and this TechCrunch sourcing pointing instead to a Barnes & Noble partnership with Xbox Live streaming built in. Both claims are unconfirmed, but they agree on the core fact — Microsoft will show tablet hardware on Monday.
The Xbox Live angle has a paper trail: Microsoft said a year ago that Xbox LIVE would be built into Windows 8, so streaming the service onto a tablet is the natural extension. There is also history weighing on this — the 2010 Microsoft-H.P. slate PC announced ahead of Apple's iPad never became a consumer product, which is why the syndication here (ZDNet, VentureBeat, Ars Technica, Engadget and four more outlets picking up the same sourcing) reads as unusually broad for a rumor.
First-order effects
- If the Barnes & Noble pairing is real, Nook hardware gains Xbox Live streaming overnight — turning an e-reader line into a Microsoft-content device and giving Barnes & Noble a differentiator against Amazon's Kindle Fire that it cannot build itself.
- A Microsoft-built tablet would put the company in direct competition with the same OEM partners it needs to sell Windows 8 licenses to, repeating the channel tension of the 2010 H.P. slate episode.
Second-order effects
- Amazon and Google's cheap Android tablets would face a rival whose advantage is exclusive content rather than price, forcing both to lean harder on their own media ecosystems.
- OEMs like H.P. would have to decide whether to keep investing in Windows tablets when Microsoft competes with them at the hardware layer — a question that shaped every Microsoft platform move since the Zune.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward device makers competing on locked-in service libraries — games, video, books — rather than specs, with content partnerships becoming the main currency of tablet differentiation.
- If Microsoft ships first-party hardware alongside Windows 8, the PC industry's traditional division (Microsoft builds software, partners build machines) starts to erode toward an integrated model closer to Apple's.
The trend: Tablet competition is shifting from hardware specifications to exclusive content ecosystems, pulling media and retail companies into device partnerships with platform owners.