What's behind Microsoft's fall from dominance?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

IEstimated number of Windows 8 sales are over 40 million copies, and while the initial offering for W8 was a bit of a stinker, 8.1 is a lot more enterprise friendly.  I could honestly park you in front of my 8.1 machine, and you'd be hard pressed to find it gimped in the least.

But hey, don't let me interject irrefutable numerical sales numbers into your arguments

Doubtful.    But I believe this oft-quoted number has been refuted by a number of trustworthy sources.  That that's 40 million copies of the software that have been shipped to resellers and OEM's, etc., but not the number that's actually been put into consumer's hands, which is much lower.  In other words, a lot of those "40 million" are still sitting on store shelves.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Still more expensive than Windows 7.  The real question is, why would anyone pay to upgrade, when desktop computers are getting used less and less by average consumers?  They need to incentivize this pricing if they expect it to sell in volume.  Of course their real market is still pushing to bottom-feeding consumers buying computers at box stores like Best Buy, Walmart, etc.

(quote) "Windows 8.1 will cost the same as Windows 8 did this time last year, with US pricing starting at $119 and Windows 8.1 Pro costing $199; an extra $10 gets you Windows Media Center." -

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/384244/windows-8-1-lets-pc-makers-start-from-scratch?_mout=1&utm_campaign=pcpro_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter