I If you look at the desktop side by itself there were many improvements under the hood,
Oh, i agree, i'm all for IE10, the extensions to powershell, the faster startup, improved power management, etc.
certainly enough to justify $40 upgrade. Metro does suck though, but you aren't really forced to use it and it will be the key to the future if MS can improve it.
This I don't necessarily agree with.
The problem is that in those areas where there are improvements, Windows 7 is close enough.
But sooner or later people will either be forced onto Win8 or to jump ship to something else. Win7 has issues with 4k sector drives, won't be getting DirectX updates, IE updates beyond IE10, etc. The version of Office after 2013 probably won't run on it either.
It's also interesting to note that in terms of sales figures, the 40 million number that MS is throwing around is including corporates on enterprise licensing programs.
i.e., the company i work for has 650 desktop licenses for Microsoft OS + virus scanner + office, etc.
As soon as win8 was released, we were entitled to upgrade to Win8.
Which means according to MS sales figures, we have "purchased" 650 copies of Win8.
There are 2 coipies of it installed in the company thus far, and no immediate plans to consider deployment until Windows 7 becomes too hard to support.
So... take win8 sales figures (or any sales figures they put out for that matter) with a big handful of salt.
