Personal computers largely started much like smartphones today, where you bought a black box for a set price, and once an upgrade was on the market you wanted, you trashed the whole computer and bought the whole new system. Moving to the IBM compatible standard in the late 80's created standard hardware interfaces that allowed companies to become hyper-focused on specific components, which ended up creating companies like nVidia, ATI and many others. Before that, these component companies were spending much of their research and development time making sure their parts were compatible with the variety of computer systems made by the manufacturers that contracted them. Once the interfaces were standardized, they could shift that R&D to pure performance tuning and could sell directly to the public on a larger scale. It also obviously saved consumers tons of money since they no longer were replacing their case, keyboard, monitor and other parts that were working fine that the new system did not upgrade.
I am hoping this works and we could possibly see a similar shift in the smartphone and tablet market
