But I really wish people would separate blind emotion from good business sense, other wise wishing for "more of the same" is how you end up in a RIM-like situation where BlackBerry OS 5 is no different from BlackBerry OS 7 and your company gets lapped by competitors who out innovate you (Apple, Google, etc...).
But 'good business sense' includes maintaining a diverse product line...
Most companies have multiple product lines. Take an automaker: they might have a SUV or two, a few crossovers, a pickup truck, a small hatchback, and two or three sizes of sedans. Some automakers also have medium-duty/heavy-duty truck divisions. Some (e.g. Hyundai) even make coaches.
And presumably, unless they're stupid (and there is a reason 2 out of 3 US automakers went bust...), you try your hardest to make a competitive, if not best-in-class, product in each segment.
Microsoft is the dominant player in keyboard-mouse operating systems used for productivity applications. There remains a great market for keyboard-mouse operating systems (it's easy to say 'but people are busy using Facebook', but what are Facebook's developers supposed to use? Metro? What are Facebook's sysadmins supposed to use to monitor hundreds of thousands of servers? Metro?). That market may not be growing anymore; it may even be shrinking as some people find that their needs are better met by something else. But it's still a large, profitable market.
Again, a car analogy. Look at the shrinking of the pickup truck market in the face of high gas prices, etc. Again, you have some people whose needs are better served by something else moving away from pickup trucks. Was Ford's response to stop innovating in pickup trucks? No. They've continued to innovate in the truck segment, but at the same time, they launched some new small cars.
If Ballmer/Sinofsky ran Ford, they'd have discontinued the F series, and told contractors who need to carry building materials that they're "resistant to change" because they can't see themselves transporting 4000 lbs of bricks in a Fiesta. (And yes, you can carry 4000 lbs of bricks in a Fiesta. It requires making... 10+ trips. Which is about as efficient as using the 'Desktop' in Win8. But it can be done - you just need to 'update' your processes!) Luckily Alan Mulally isn't as stupid...
Ford needed a small car? Great, they launched one, while continuing to invest in and produce their pickup truck lineup because there's still considerable money to be made in pickup trucks, and that won't change until contractors (probably among some of Ford's most loyal customers) find a better way to move 4000 lbs of bricks in one shot.
(And if you want to talk about RIM, they could easily have launched a second OS/lineup years ago. Keep the businessy OS for as long as businesses whose executives know how to use it want it, and launch something else to compete in the consumer segment. Their mistake was that they stuck to a single-product strategy. )
You want another example? Look at mainframes. A shrinking market I'm sure, compared to 25+ years ago, but IBM hasn't given up, and in fact they're making lots of money selling mainframes to banks, airlines, and other such customers for which mainframes remain the best computing option. They have a nice little profitable niche with loyal customers who have a lot invested in the platform and who will happily come back to buy more. Just because an mainframe wasn't a good way to run PageMaker in 1986 didn't mean IBM killed the mainframe division...
Microsoft needed a tablet OS? Great, I have no problem with them launching one. But why did they deliberately degrade the keyboard/mouse experience for the serious productivity users? Why are they hinting that the serious productivity environment, for which there is no suitable replacement, is effectively deprecated? When they wanted to launch a video game console, they didn't turn Windows into an Xbox gaming-centered environment, did they?
Really, there are two reasons:
a) they want to create an installed base for Metro artificially. People going down to Worst Buy and picking up a home computer once W8 is out will be counted as part of MS' tablet user base. So might corporate machines with a Win8 sticker on the back, even if the company uses their volume licence agreement to downgrade to XP/7.
If they launched 'Windows Tablet Edition', and their partners delivered the same mediocre hardware they've always delivered, Windows Tablet Edition would sell one unit for every 50-100 iPads sold. (That's what happens when you're effectively ... third... to enter a market, and the competition has 80M units in the field while you have zero.) See Windows Phone. So this way, they can try to entice app developers and Wall Street analysts by bragging about their millions and millions of Metro-enabled systems that they shipped overnight. Even if those systems have been downgraded to 7, or if the home users are cursing Metro every day.
b) they're so blinded by iPad sales numbers that they've forgotten how cloud services are coded, administered, etc, not to mention all the other serious work that goes on every day in multitasking, multi-window, keyboard-mouse operating systems. (Again, just because pickup truck sales drop 50% doesn't mean that 4000 lbs of bricks magically move around in economy cars.)
This passes for good business sense?
Honestly, I increasingly agree with the people who think Win9 is the real end game. Turn Win8 into a tablet OS, and MS will get an installed base of 50-150M machines in 6 months, which will 'stop' their tablet bleeding. People who do real work will huff and puff, but will mostly stick to 7 since most of the serious productivity software doesn't really exist for anything else (maybe Mac OS X, but Apple's hardware lineup isn't ideal for business use right now). And then they launch 9, which will magically fix the problem, let people go back to a keyboard-mouse paradigm, and have the Metro things running in a little window on the side of your 2560x1440 screen.
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