No one likes Windows 8, people are saying it's even worse than Vista, and the head of the Windows division at MS has been sacked. What went wrong?
For my money, Win8 was a last, desperate throw of the dice. Microsoft decided it had to win the mobile space, and wagered the desktop as its stake. MS famously understands the value of developers, and knew that there just weren't enough people developing for Windows phone, so voilà! it was going to forcibly convert all its desktop developers into becoming mobile developers by foisting a unified GUI onto them. The initial release of the new Visual Studio was the big clue for this: free app development was going to be tied to the Metro interface - a decision they quickly had to revise, but it revealed the thinking behind their actions.
And now it looks like they've lost the bet. Enterprises are already allowing people to choose to bring their own devices to work. Now that a substantial workforce re-education appears to be necessary for Metro-or-whatever-it's-called-now, they may decide to go with Macs instead. Or maybe, just maybe, 2013 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?
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