[Southack]

"Once again this is just a typical evolutionary cycle of Microsoft products. In fact they’re experiencing record sales and revenue because none of their competitors have a better solution to the problem you’re describing."

That's irrelevant. There's a demand. It's a large, well-financed, corporate demand.

Leave it unfilled long enough and someone will figure out how to serve those customers.

...and that's a long-term strategic error on MS's part.

[Golden Eagle]

Not really, they still support backward compatibility to a much greater extent than any of their competitors. Check out the history of the 2 biggest competitors they have in desktop OS anyway, Apple and Red Hat, both of which have completely abandoned entire platforms before, and also have a history of announcing such changes unexpectedly. You’ve still not named any legitimate threat that can better answer your problem than MS.