I'd like to see the hypothetical Windows buyer who has a choice in what version they're running. Macs come with OSX installed. Windows laptops come with Home Premium. That's the full extent of it. Consumers might have the option to upgrade to Professional in some cases, that's about it.
Basically people are complaining that Windows is not cool. If that's what you mean, just say it, don't fucking dance around with some "oh they're stupid and don't understand people even though they've sold 200 million Windows 7 licenses in the same time Apple sold 4 million OSX computers" bullshit. Then find me some statistics showing that the cooler technology always wins out.
Upgraders: They can't run windows XP forever. There's hundreds of millions of them. Good point, but you're looking in the "now". Think about what's going to happen to all those Windows XP / Vista / 7 users a few years from now. Hundreds of millions of them will be given the choice to upgrade and then they get to chose 1 of 5 licenses.
The cooler tech doesn't win, the less stressful tech built around people, not short term corporate profits wins out. And yes they've sold a lot more Windows 7 licenses than OSX has, but that's thanks to their wonderful monopoly they've had all these years. It is dying out. Windows market share in the US is dropping, especially amoung young people. If everything was fine and dandy in Windows world, MS wouldn't be going through all these extreme make-overs with Office, and Metro, and Windows Phone, and Windows 8. They're fine now, profit wise, but they themselves know that there's trouble up ahead.
Either way, thank Bahamut for Apple and Linux, they've threatened Windows enough to make MS innovate.
Upgraders are a case where someone may be doing there homework and get confused, yes. Luckily most upgraders have a local techie in the family who can guide them. When it comes to Anytime Upgrade, Microsoft does a pretty good job of directing you to what you should upgrade to and why.
I give all my thanks to the proliferation of laptops in the consumer world. Laptops are junk, all of them, no matter how long the hardware lasts. They cannot be upgraded hardware wise, and the vendor will stop supporting older models for drivers and software updates. Combine that with slowing hardware, and you might as well just buy a new laptop every 2-5 years, solving the upgrade problem.
I don't view tablets as a point where A) anyone could have reliably predicted their explosive growth or B) desktop software will remain dominant. It's not that Windows didn't innovate enough to keep up with tablets, its that people decided smartphones were good enough. It remains to be seen if people keep up on that approach.
The desktop is dying, and it has been for a long time. Technology moves on. Terminals stopped being the in-thing, just as mainframes, UNIX, and DOS. When a formerly dominant technology is gone the competitors didn't kill it, time did. Time will kill everything. Linux is in a state of extreme renovation (though still lagging behind in some areas) and OSX is no spring chicken anymore. Microsoft is the only vendor who seems to be defending their core business from the onslaught of consumerization. Apple seems content to just let the desktop die (MS has had radically different XP, Vista/7, and now Win8 while Apple just has the same decade-old OSX), and if iOS doesn't make some changes to keep up with Android and Windows Phone, everything they have will crumble.
Basically people are complaining that Windows is not cool. If that's what you mean, just say it, don't fucking dance around with some "oh they're stupid and don't understand people even though they've sold 200 million Windows 7 licenses in the same time Apple sold 4 million OSX computers" bullshit. Then find me some statistics showing that the cooler technology always wins out.