Wouldn't it be nice ...
... if fewer shills exacerbated an already ailing market? And M$ is the chief offender here. Your 'evangelists' have you eating your own cooking.
You want to know what killed the PC market? Sure the economy has something to do with it. And yet, there are movies making over a billion US$. So what else ya got? Could it be your absurd insistence on 'cool' for coolness' sake? Everyone seems to have decided that whatever Apple is doing is what they should be doing, entirely forgetting what a niche role Apple still plays. Chicklet keys, all eye-candy UIs, and San Fran sex-appeal was never going to fly with most of us. Knock it off, and we'll start buying your products again.
And I've got some advice for M$ in particular. Shed your Snidley Whiplash approach to customer AND PARTNER relations. Cease ALL the psychopathic attempts to generate your own 'reality distortion' field, and by this, I mean all the stupid marketing hyperbole (yes it it!) like 'charms' and 'digital life experiences'. (Get over yourselves!) (We're not Apple fanbois.) Simpllfy and standardize the UI (and the terminology). (And by standard, I mean that you STOP changing it with every release, as if that's supposed to fool us into thinking that we're buying something truly different when we all know that it isn't.) Expand the scriptability of your applications a la *n*x. ('Power' shell is a joke!) And try to do for web(site)-development what you did for application development with VisualBasic, the absolutely last truly great thing you've ever done (XP, after all, really having been nothing more than the logical development/merging of 98 and NT). (Yeah, I know, they just bought it, and marketed it.)
If I can't do it within a few keystrokes, it's broken. If reaching for the mouse is the only way to do it, it's broken. Icons are broken. 'Tiles' are DOA. If I can't script it, it's useless. So, pretty much everything out of Microsoft for the past decade has been broken. Did you not hear your own users complaining about the ribbon in Office? How deaf can you be? And then you seriously think we're going to love Metro?!
Phone users aren't PC users, and those who are, don't want their PCs working like their phones. They only wish their phones were as useful as their PCs, but that can never be. So stop trying.
Surface RT?! Brilliant packaging. Brilliant move with the keyboard cover. I'm almost tempted to get one. But I can't install any real OS on that ARM processor. Besides, no 4G. Dumb. Seriously, seriously dumb.