Microsoft: Just swallow this tablet ... the rest will take care of itself

Are we sure?

It looks very much to me that putting RT on a tablet means they're aiming not so much at the hardware or the software, but as acting as a controlling retail channel. That's where the money is. That and subscription models. If, for comparatively little effort, you can lock in customers to an ecosystem and take a cut of everything they do in it, you can mine the hardware/software dependence without ever having to do anything new. Very much like Apple did with the graphic design community and their frightfully expensive font libraries.

Ten years ago, that would have seemed laughably arrogant, and wouldn't have stood a chance in the retail environment. After the collapse of so many content empires, music stores and the DRM ruckus, expecting people to cede control over their own computers just so they could be more efficiently fleeced would have been as insane an idea as selling "thin clients" to consumers. Or 'push media', for that matter. Back then, computers were tools for enabling creativity and innovation as much as for flogging it. Linux was offering a genuinely open, in all senses, alternative to the proprietary restrictions of monopolists, and a new generation was growing up with computers, unfazed by complexity and jargon, who would engineer innovative solutions, turn data into knowledge and forge a bold, new, meritocratic economy.

It hasn't turned out like that, sadly. Instead, it's turned into a meretricious, ad-spattered, proprietary soup of electronic soma, served up via pointlessly expensive, and mostly useless, devices. Walk through any public space, and you'll see a huddled mass of shuffling humanoids, like an ADHD version of Second Life, tweeting gibberish to the void, waiting for some Shoreditch flack to rediscover the knowledge economy.

Perhaps I'm getting old, but if this is the future, I think I'd rather be dead.

It isn't the cloud its familiarity

W8 is there to seed the market with the Pane interface so MS can move into mobile. They won't lose much desktop market because of the W8 interface and once people are familiar with the design, they are more likely to pick up a windows phone, because its obvious that it will work with their computer, right?

MS need/want to get back to "windows is the only option" and that would be hard to do if they themselves introduced yet another interface in the phone market. The last thing MS want is a heterogeneous marketplace as that will suggest that Windows is not the only fruit and Other Things Are Possible. Things like ARM and Android and iOS follow each other into corporate IT and then comes Linux and other things which are Bad For Microsoft.

The desktop is a dream, I think people just haven't been able to understand how it's used by reading articles, mostly because people review it before using it more than an hour. They talk about it felt to initially transition to it, rather than talking about how they feel NOW.

Windows 8 Pro is many, many times better than Windows 7, which I'll admit was almost acceptable. Windows RT on the other hand is consumer grade weakness, but so are tablets at this point. Gotta figure people that hate Windows 8 Pro haven't tried it. Metro is kinda neat to play around with, but there isn't any good software yet.

I've never been interested in a tablet or smartphone before until Surface Pro was announced. It's a shame they couldn't launch it at the same time as Windows 8 RT. And it's a shame with the names of these things, probably causing confusion. 8 Pro is a full computer and 8 RT is so far, an experiment.