Personally, I believe part of the problem is the artificial barriers to platform adoption that Microsoft continues to insist upon. For example, Windows Phone 8

Personally, I believe part of the problem is the artificial barriers to platform adoption that Microsoft continues to insist upon. For example, Windows Phone 8 is basically a good platform. But there's no support for OpenGL -- the graphics interface of choice in the mobile world today. If they wanted more "apps" (games) for the platform, then choosing to support OpenGL would have been a sign they actually care about that. There's also a bit of "not invented here" going on. They could have embraced and contributed to webkit, and made the web better for everyone, instead they wasted millions of dollars recreating what someone else had already done in IE10 and then limited IE10 to the newest of platforms. While I'm not suggesting that they slavishly follow what everyone else does with webkit, they could have at least used it as a base and contributed meaningful changes back. And finally, yes, as a Windows 8 user myself, I can tell you that while the underlying OS is clearly loads better, the Modern UI is a mishmash of UI ideas with razor-sharp usability edges.