Yep, they made a duff release with Win. 8, just like Vista. 
Vista scared everyone off moving from XP for a very long time, and 8 will do the same for Win 7.
If that happens again, the platform is dead. Home users are leaving PCs in their droves for tablets and other devices that are just less hassle, and most enterprises have not long migrated to 7, hence the carrot to migrate in the first year. I smell desperation.
Vista wasn't so bad. It was actually quite good (bar a slow startup). It was just a little too different from XP, and techie people are notoriously lazy to learn new tricks, and easily frustrated by the extra protection better security enforces.
The number of bricked Vista PCs I've had to rescue for relatives suggests otherwise, but, regardless of the quality of the software, which I never actually used in anger myself, it was a flop for issues beyond the technical. It arrived just when everyone was freshly committed to XP was clearly going to need a bit of investment to get users up to speed, finances were in a right state and so on.. Microsoft's product update cycle just doesn't dance to the same beat as industry's.
They are looking at history repeating now. I suspect they are relying on migration from 7 to 10 to move towards a more unified platfiorm on PCs, surface and mobile, because it's anything but at the moment, so have decided to sacrifice some desktop revenue as a last ditch attempt to achieve that.
I also fully expect there to be a catch.
