Being late to market doesn't help.  Microsoft now has to fight like mad to gain marketshare in the tablet market, which is now on its way of eating up the laptop market, and how people do computing personally.  Tablets with decent keyboards are the future. 

And Windows 8 is really cool.  I was in a Microsoft showroom (like an Apple store, but shows off Microsoft instead) near where I am, and they have cool stuff.  But, the buzz is now Android and iOS, so that is an issue Microsoft faces.  They have two other competitors at this point where computer is going.  And sometimes, no amount of marketing spent will fix that.

Thanks for replying and clarifying your statement. I agree that Windows 8 works but I believe that Microsoft went backwards in the desktop space. The problem is the interface more than anything else as you yourself have pointed out. People may well get used to it over time however if given a choice between 7 and 8 I think almost anyone that's remotely informed will stick with Win 7.

A touch interface is simply not practical for a desktop and it's even more of a problem at work where you need an efficient dedicated desktop OS not one that's built to run like an app within a touch based OS.

I think this will hurt Microsoft even more with their Business customers than home users and predict that Microsoft will fix this mistake when they release Windows 8s successor.

Like I said earlier this is a great OS for touch devices but Microsoft made a mistake in thinking they could force a touch based OS onto desktop consumers.

Ballmer needs to be replaced with someone that is an actual visionary before Apple and Google do serious damage to the company..

I like the direction ms is going. they are unifying all of their sytems and streamlining their services.

I actually like windows 8. I recently bought a laptop with one and was I was a little disgusted at the thought of having it initially. But to my amazement, it works really well for me. I particularly like the massive speed difference between the two. Shut down is faster and reboot is faster. The start screen search function is improved and pinning to the start screen is very welcome. Took me less than an hour to master it.

Overall, I'm not getting the criticisms. It works well for me but what works well for me doesn't work well for everyone else I guess.

I hate windows but Windows 7 looks and is far superior to Windows 8
Won't change anytime soon

Although Windows 8 is not largely successful right now, it was definitely a good business decision to start catering to tablets. I was once very skeptical of tablets, but I just recently took the plunge and ordered a hybrid tablet/pc for almost $900. Like me, many consumers are already jumping towards the tablet market which is actually making the pc market smaller. Microsoft needed to do get into tablets to not fall behind. However, for desktops, windows 8 is a bit of a step backwards in some areas. They could have handled it better.

Win 8 contains Win 7 in it.. and Win 8 is superior as it has faster booting time as well as better RAM management.. so programs are faster.

Get your facts right.

ROFL.

Next xmas we will be laughing at these articles.

...using up almost 16GB of a Tablets memory