My 2 cents
Not much will happen unless...
When people boot up their new windows 8 computer they all freak out and call Microsoft. My hunch is that they'll buy them, boot them, not really like them but since they don't know what to do, they'll do nothing. If they do nothing Microsoft will do nothing. IT pros like the ones who comment on these articles have options. We know Linux exists and we either use it already or decided not to.
If you tell people that Microsoft office won't work, that alone will keep them using something they don't like (windows 8) rather than adapt to something else they don't know.
Don't get me wrong, Windows 8 will help things at least to some degree. I'm just not sure it will much.
