Windows comes to Raspberry Pi-style board in Microsoft/Intel project
Sharks Cove. — Microsoft — Even Microsoft wants a piece of the development board market made famous by Arduino and Raspberry Pi. — Microsoft has teamed up with Intel and hardware maker CircuitCo to design the $300 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel has been circling this market since 2013, when it launched the much pricier MinnowBoard as its own homage to the Raspberry Pi. What changes with Sharks Cove is that Microsoft is now inside the design too: the $300 board pairs Intel silicon with Windows, built with hardware maker CircuitCo.
The move puts Microsoft into a hobbyist/embedded segment that Arduino and Raspberry Pi built almost entirely on open, non-Windows stacks — and follows Raspberry Pi's own April 2014 push toward more modular, Arduino-like hardware, showing both incumbents treating the dev-board ecosystem as strategically worth courting.
First-order effects
- Developers gain an x86 board that runs Windows at hobbyist scale, giving Microsoft a direct presence in a maker market where its OS previously had no footprint.
Second-order effects
- Intel gets a showcase to argue x86 belongs in embedded designs long dominated by ARM-based boards like the Raspberry Pi, while CircuitCo secures a marquee design win from two of the industry's biggest names.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, low-cost development boards become a standard acquisition funnel for OS vendors seeding the embedded and connected-device market — hardware priced near cost, monetized through the software stack it locks developers into.
The trend: OS and chip vendors are using affordable development boards as a front door into the embedded-device market, turning a hobbyist niche into a platform battleground.