[concats]

What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.

It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.

[Root_Denied]

Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.

[wolvoleo]

If they thought windows 8 would tap the mobile market then they really didn't understand much of that market at all.

Meanwhile windows phone was pretty good actually but they killed it way too early. They had an app gap but time and money would have solved it.