[tacticalogic]

Nobody buys an OS for the OS. They buy the OS for the apps.

[Noumenon]

Nobody buys an OS for the OS. They buy the OS for the apps.

Yep - I own what own in order to Do Stuff, not admire the OS. At home, I'm all Win 7, 32 and 64 bit. Got a utility laptop dual booting Win 7 and Ubuntu. Considering a Samsung Galaxy Note II for my next personal phone.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

To some degree true. However

1. Increasingly apps are being made multiplatform and in many cases are web based. In the PC world apps are less important then they used to be.

2. Ultimately if the OS itself sucks, users are going to become unhappy, developers are going to become unhappy and at some point you reach a tipping point. That’s ultimately my point here - after years and years of at best, mediocrity out of Redmond, the whole eco system and mindshare is shifting - and it may have nothing fundamentally to do with tiles.

[Dr. Sivana]

Nobody buys an OS for the OS. They buy the OS for the apps.

Not always. A fair number of Mac users prefer the MacOS even though 99% of their work is in the same Adobe Suite that is available for Windows.

Also, if you consider Windows 3.1 to be an operating system, it sold quite well even though the only major apps available for it early on were Word, Excel and PageMaker. Most folks were mainly playing solitaire on it, as they were still locked into 1-2-3, WordPerfect or Multimate, and didn't use PageMakwer.