Even Vista had 200 million users after two years. If Microsoft make the same mistakes as Vista (which is unlikely) and it fizzles, Windows sales figures remain mind-blowingly huge.
Why haven't Windows 7-only applications caught on? A major reason is consumer expectations coupled with only a marginal effort required for backwards compatibility for a big increase in market. .NET was a technical back-end change that isn't user-facing, so it competes with legacy code-bases and existing experience.
If Microsoft's new framework fails, it'll be for different reasons.
> Why haven't Windows 7-only applications caught on? A major reason is consumer expectations coupled with only a marginal effort required for backwards compatibility for a big increase in market. .NET was a technical back-end change that isn't user-facing, so it competes with legacy code-bases and existing experience.
And that's reason enough for Win8 applications not to catch on, unless microsoft manages to create a substantial "other" market in the form of phones or Xboxen. Whether or not they succeed, we will have to wait and see.
Why haven't Windows 7-only applications caught on? A major reason is consumer expectations coupled with only a marginal effort required for backwards compatibility for a big increase in market. .NET was a technical back-end change that isn't user-facing, so it competes with legacy code-bases and existing experience.
If Microsoft's new framework fails, it'll be for different reasons.