Now MS is "doubling down" on Win 8 instead of making concessions to those who need an interface that works well with keyboard and passive monitor. One might say, this proves it wasn't just Ballmer running the company into the ground!
Seriously, what is the chance that MS will come up with something better liked in another version a year or two in future?
It may be a tired cliché now to talk of Linux for PCs becoming mass-market, but things are looking better and better for this prospect. In particular, (a) nice noob-friendly GUIs (b) hardware support better than ever and (c) games finally coming along (thanks Valve/Steam).
What concessions are they missing? It's still the exact same damn shell when you drop down to Desktop mode. I use it all the time, on 3 different mouse&keyboard machines.
Vista had some really good ideas, executed poorly. Win8 has some good ideas, executed poorly.
By all measures, Win9 should be a great OS. MS just has a nasty habbit of releasing experimental software as if it were ready for production.
Every part of Vista was a significant change leading to a lot of application incompatibilities. App developers hadn't dealt with changes like that for years, so fixes were slower than they should have been.
That was a major cause of Vista's poor reputation.
I think they have jumped the shark with 8.x as far as their desktop OS goes.