Totally concur about lack of communication to devs which is why despite being primarily a MS dev I haven't bothered to jump on the WinRT/Win8 app store empty bandwagon, and have instead been playing with Objective C recently.
For MS to regain status:
1) Fire Ballmer and get someone that understands technology/design to lead a tech company
2) Be more transparent to devs
3) Put more resources to the core tech that differentiates their OS like Apple does with Objective C API, MS should be doing with WPF (not Silverlight or WinRT or another tech - their thought process of supporting JS didn't really gain much JS devs for Win8/WinRT apps, and just ended up burning bridges with long time MS enterprise devs)
Failing the above I see MS losing more devs and as a result less apps supporting the OS and finally less market share.