Original equipment manufacturer

Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is a company that makes a part or subsystem that is used in another company's end product. For example, if Acme Manufacturing Co. makes power cords that are used on IBM computers, Acme is the OEM.

However, the term is used in several other ways, which causes ambiguity. It sometimes refers to the maker of a system that includes other companies' subsystems, an end-product producer, an automotive part that is manufactured by the same company that produced the original part used in the automobile's assembly, or a value-added reseller.

Automotive parts

When referring to auto parts, OEM refers to parts and manufacturers involved in the final assembly of a vehicle—in contrast to aftermarket parts that can be installed after the car comes out of the factory. For example, if Ford used Autolite spark plugs, Exide batteries, Bosch fuel injectors, and Ford's own engine blocks and heads when building a car, then car restorers and collectors consider all of those brands as OEM brands, in contrast to aftermarket brands (such as Champion plugs, DieHard batteries, Kinsler fuel injectors, and BMP engine blocks and heads). This can mean that Bosch injectors, for example, are considered OEM parts on one car model and aftermarket parts on another model.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows (or simply Windows) is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of several families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) or Windows Server. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x and Windows Mobile.

Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. However, since 2012, because of the massive growth of smartphones, Windows sells less than Android, which became the most popular operating system in 2014, when counting all of the computing platforms each operating system runs on; in 2014, the number of Windows devices sold were less than 25% of Android devices sold. However, comparisons across different markets are not fully relevant; and for personal computers, Windows is still the most popular operating system.