I don't think Windows 8 is causing the decline, but what it is doing is failing to reverse it. Traditionally, a new release of Windows has been a driver of PC s

I don't think Windows 8 is causing the decline, but what it is doing is failing to reverse it. Traditionally, a new release of Windows has been a driver of PC sales because it did new and useful things that people wanted. The problem with Windows 8 is that for a laptop it is pretty much on balance worse than Windows 7. (To be clear, it definitely does quite a number of things better, but it does about the same number of things worse, and the ones that are worse are right in your face while the improvements are mostly behind the scenes). I actually doubt Microsoft is too surprised by this. My feeling is that they pretty much wrote off Windows 8 as collateral damage from their push into the touch screen / tablet market which they consider to be essential to future survival. They may suffer huge losses in sales from Win8 licenses but the upside is that their new UI is getting forced in front of every consumer and business professional. That is something money simply can't buy. Come Windows 9, when the actually do something people want, people will be buying something familiar.