@Mark. re. ""Microsoft are doomed""
Quite frankly I think many of those who post the kind of "contribution" that so often involves spelling MS' using a dollar sign are expressing what they hope will happen rather than that which they believe *will* happen. There are of course in relation to any future for MS in tablets several imponderables.
1. Will Win8 per se be an advance on Win7 or will it get "Vistaed"?
2. Will the Win8 port to ARM architecture be successful from the technical point of view?
3. Will the UI be any good?
4. Will the compiling of such packages as Office for ARM be successful?
5. Will the devs produce genuinely good apps that run well on the os?
6. Will the OEMs produce genuinely good, attractive and sensibly priced kit to run it on?
All these questions are wholly legitimate and non-contrived issues for debate (they are of course the types of challenges that face all major software/hardware companies). However a fairly significant proportion of the postings we see are absolutely uninterested in the *possibility* that the answers to the above questions might, just might, be yes. The reason is of course very simple, they *want* the answers to be "no" because *IF* the answers are "yes" MS is likely (because of its brand recognition in the market place amongst a large number of ordinary punters) to have a major success on its hands. Given that I neither have an axe to grind nor a crystal ball I have no certain idea what the answers to the above questions will *actually* turn out to be although I am certainly interested in what they *might* turn out to be. We see the same phenomenon being directed at Nokia in other threads from the same "M$"haters/obsessives, they *want* it to go as wrong as possible for the "team(s)" they hate - rational debate about what may go right *or* wrong in this area is not something they have any interest in.
For the record: We run both Win7 and Ubuntu at home and I use a Mac at work, Mm Arctic Fox runs an N8 and I have a Desire Z.