IMHO, average consumers aren't buying tablets and running home to hop on word or powerpoint. They are going home and using it as a entertainment device. They may use it as a stop gap to get some productive things done on the fly but that is about it.
Know the market.
Microsoft is not a visionary/innovative company. They continue to rely on rehashed Microsoft Office and Windows to keep them rolling. Times are changing though. I'd be curious as to how many people are really upgrading Office frequently these days. How many are really using Office outside of work and school? Microsoft Outlook gets the nod as probably the standout app in the office suite but now all of us consume email via phone/tablet. Google and Apple are coming on strong with cloud Office suites behind the scenes and if they pull it off, Microsoft will be that much closer to desperation. It's coming. Universal file format. Install it once and forget it.
Do you really want to be that business owner 30 years from now going back through his archives for critical info saved in Word 2003 format but you can't open it any longer because that format changed out many years ago and you dont have access to Word 2003 anymore?
Professionals....
There may be a few executives out there that are attracted to Surface Pro, but I say it's DOA as well. All the executives already have tablets and phones and have had enough time to figure out how to integrate them seamlessly into their work flow. Do you think they want to dump all that and jump into a new interface and a young ecosystem just to have access to office? I don't think so.
Microsoft's best bet at survival is turning its software into an appliance/service subscription. Shrink wrap retail and 3 year upgrade cycles are pretty much done. People want updates faster and expect them very cheap or free.
It's always confusing to continue to see people saying the ipad does the dumb tablet thing better than anyone else, I just don't see it. Windows 8 can be a dumb tablet just as well as the ipad can, ie: a simple media consumption device. While Metro sucks for "windows like" activities, it doesn't suck for doing "ipad like" stuff like watching videos, movies music, pictures, etc. You can't even argue that it's thicker, more expensive, etc because it's not.
The ONLY area iOS has locked down is in the sheer number of apps in its ecosystem. Even though the number of apps is GROSSLY over exaggerated, iOS still has a lot lot more apps than windows if you only look at the windows store side, ignoring for a second the trouncing iOS would receive if we considered desktop programs. The big question in the dumb tablet arena is will Microsoft be able to entice developers into its ecosystem? Personally I think not unless they revamp Metro. For me there is
nothing in the iOS ecosystem that I have not been able to replace with a windows app, or usually with a desktop program that does the job much better, and I'm definitely a power user.
It's funny, but all these years with the ipad and now being on a windows tablet I realized that I was trying for years to make the ipad into a computer, but it just never worked. Just little incredible discoveries on things that windows gives me freedom to do, things I discover every day. They may seem like small things, but they are huge to me, for example high contrast mode in Windows works perfectly for night time viewing, it doesn't invert the entire OS, only text and backgrounds, it leaves things like pictures intact. Contrasted with iOS where everything gets inverted making pictures non viewable, and Android which doesn't even have a high contrast mode. Prob a stupid example, but something which is pretty thrilling to me in my quest to not disturb my wife in bed.
