You don't cross out maintenance and support by having more efficient hardware. Those giants, by my understanding, make a lot of money from support or directly from taking care of servers/datacenters.

At scale, self-support and self-warranty is also cheaper than a support contract from HP/Dell/Lenovo.

It's no different to opencompute et al.

If hardware mffs see this as a challenge, there's an easy solution. Start building it!

The huge gap in this, opencompute, etc is that for most of us, it's nowhere near cost effective to actually have these designs fabricated. That leaves a gaping hole for supermicro, dell, etc to fill.

I wonder what Microsoft's position means to their traditional OEM partners. By slimming down their margins, this may end up as an existential threat to x86 server makers. I am curious whether they'll take it very lightly.