The negative comments about Windows 8 above were obviously made by people with substantial computer knowledge about the problems of Windows 8 that affect them, reasonably enough because those are the kind of people that are going to participate in this kind of forum.

But there is another whole class of people that Microsoft has thumbed their nose at with this recent example of ego and greed: The less computer literate users. These are people that use email, word processing, web browsing, an image viewer and not much else. They may have great difficulty in learning a new way to access the few things that they do on a computer and learning a new way will do absolutely nothing to improve their experience.

The specific people I am thinking of are my 95 year old father and his wife. They use their computers quite a bit and reasonably enough decided to replace one of their aging XP computers. Little did they know that they were part of the market segment that Microsoft didn't give a crap about any more and were shocked to find out that getting a new computer meant having to navigate a maze of new ideas about the GUI without any apparent justification other than Microsoft wanted to force it on them. Eventually they returned the machine and found a Windows 7 machine to replace their old XP machine. I wish I could tell you that they had moved to Linux. I am now firmly in the anti-Microsoft camp. I won't buy a Microsoft driven smart phone or the surface tablet. I feel lucky there are alternatives, something that Microsoft might consider the next time it decides to use its near desktop OS monopoly as a tool to cram unwanted changes onto the users.