MS is shooting itself in the foot again. ME and VISTA both failed because MS knew better then its users what its users wanted. Like XP, 7 will have a much longer lifetime because 8 is such a mess. Sure, nice for tablets. Nice for toddlers and cats and dogs on a touch screen. But for any human older then maybe 5 who needs to do something on a non-touch screen computer, 8 is worse then useless. The under hood improvements fade away when compared to the removal of the START button and what that means. All that Microsloth had to do was give us a choice of what GUI we want.