According to AllThingsD's Thursday report, a forthcoming Los Angeles event, which Microsoft has scheduled for Monday, will witness the software company making a "major" announcement, apparently about its tablet strategy.

While some earlier reports had revealed that Microsoft would seemingly venture into the booming tablet market through its traditional hardware partners, the company has now reportedly decided to make a more direct foray into the tablet business.

According to the information shared by unnamed sources familiar with Microsoft's tablet strategy, the company's decision to produce its own tablet - with software and hardware both designed by it - will help it offer more substantial competition to the Apple iPad.

In addition, the sources also revealed that the tablets from Microsoft will likely include some models which run ARM-based processors, and others which are equipped with traditional PC processors.

Despite the fact that Microsoft's decision to manufacture its own tablet will give the company the advantage of coming up with a better equivalent for Apple's tight integration, it is still not clear as to how it plans to differentiate its device from the Windows-based devices manufactured by PC makers - like Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo.

Moreover, it is also unclear as to how these PC makers will respond to Microsoft's `own tablet' strategy because they have, on Microsoft's insistence, been developing tablets which run both Windows 8 and the ARM-based Windows RT versions.