hardware vendors

ZDNet: "The operating system may be losing its luster. In fact, you could argue that the operating system–Linux, OS X and Windows–will become an application that just happens to boot first.

And hardware vendors are on to the OS's diminishing importance."

Internet News: ""The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com.

"We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen.""