But sometimes just sitting down on your turf, doing nothing, can mean that you are left behind in evolution, when everyone else moves on to something new. Some lead, others follow, some don't bother with anything. Only dead fish floats down-stream. Yada yada.
Yes, they do like to think like that, because that's what gets so-and-so's department's budget justified for the next quarter so that it doesn't get slashed. But that has zero relevance to what the consumer thinks. Again, Coca-Cola probably had every reason to think that it wouldn't hurt to shake things up, might drum up some new interest and help them regain the ground they'd lost to Pepsi. That actually makes perfectly decent sense from a business standpoint, which is more than can be said for Microsoft's "screw around with everything that was already fine in an attempt to leverage our monolithic desktop success as a way to break into the mobile market we've absolutely failed to crack with every previous attempt, and remove as many legacy features as we can get away with in an attempt to herd customers onto the new model so we can get a cut from third-party developers" approach to Windows 8. And just like Microsoft claims to have, they meticulously focus-tested the new product and didn't proceed until they'd determined that the testees loved it.
None of that saved their bacon. The simple fact of of the matter is that, no matter how you try, in the end
you cannot manufacture a customer to fit your product. If people don't like it,
they don't like it, and that's true even if the
only reason they don't like it is because it's replacing something they were familiar with. And the more you try to push it on them, the less successful you'll be. Microsoft of all people should know that; they got a lesson in it not six years ago, with Vista. And people still remember that; now customers and OEMs alike
know that they can make Redmond pay attention, if they're stubborn enough.
For all that they still dominate desktop computing, Microsoft has
less power over their customers now than they did when ME was the supposed new hotness that, in reality, didn't live up to its predecessors. Yet they act like this is even
more of an inevitability.
Time will tell where it all goes from here; but if the Windows user base decides that they don't want this, Microsoft is going to have a
hell of a reality check waiting for them.
