Windows 7 is awesome, but it wasn't going anywhere NEW. And that's something consumers want. A constantly moving product. Constantly evolving. Not just build it once and sit on it for a decade. But something that has life.
"They are abandoning their core strengths while poorly trying to duplicate what led to Apple's recent success"
But so is Ubuntu. They're just starting to realize that there's a huge demographic out there that they can make money off of and are adjusting their assets to compete for it, I think. A lot of the doom and gloom "desktops are dying" are because of mobile but also because of the stagnation and lack of 'ease of use' of desktop operating systems. Mobile's great but lets not bullshit ourselves, you can only stare at that little screen for so long before you hop on your laptop and do everything you wanted to do 10 times faster.