Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to

Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to upgrade outside of HW replacement cycles. And to paint a even bleaker picture you still have 30%+ of the worldwide Windows user-base still running XP, i.e. while PC-users on the Windows platform, they haven't actually paid for a OS license in over a decade. The business of selling a licensed OS either shrink-wrapped or to OEMs is seemingly much less profitable than it used to be, and clearly not an area where future growth can be expected. You can't blame Microsoft for trying to find something else to base future growth on.