I've made this argument before, but I've always found Microsoft's recent obsession with killing the desktop as hugely harmful to their own business. The fact i

I've made this argument before, but I've always found Microsoft's recent obsession with killing the desktop as hugely harmful to their own business. The fact is, Microsoft has seen this future coming for some time. They got themselves into antitrust trouble for going after Netscape and Java so aggressively in the 90s because they were afraid of OSes becoming commodity software. So, how have they reacted to a world where operating systems are increasingly commodity software? By throwing their competitive advantages in their bread and butter market -- the enterprise -- out the window (no pun intended). Applications have to be rewritten to run on Metro (and thus the cheap RT devices they so desperately want to compete with the iPad), central management of RT devices is not any real improvement over other devices, and whereas in the past they made the mistake of trying to shoehorn a desktop OS onto a touch device (e.g., XP Tablet Edition), now they've gone the complete opposite direction and tried to make a touch-centric interface designed for small screens in a world where 24-27" displays aren't uncommon. While Microsoft needed to do something to stay relevant, they've so badly mismanaged the transition that I think the end result is going to be an acceleration in line of business applications moving to web applications that run anywhere. Again, that's something that's already happening, but the entire W8/RT thing has done Microsoft absolutely no favors.