Sure the home market is changing rapidly and it is certainly true that the portable and mobile market is a big part of this. How many people now sit down to do their ‘home computing’ at a desk in front of a traditional PC compared to those surfing from their netbooks on the sofa in the living room, or posting to their twitter account or blog from their iPhone ? However many sectors of industry ( mine being health ) are implicitly linked to Microsoft technologies and here change is MUCH slower, typically refresh cycles for major systems are in the region of 5-10 years.

I do believe that HTML5 will have the biggest part to play in Microsoft’s downfall. When suppliers begin to adopt this standard for corporate web applications and leave the disastrous ActiveX monster behind there will be no need for the Microsoft Operating System/Browser combo to run these apps and at last corporates will be able to chose operating systems that are genuinely better for them ( think no viruses and malware for one and this immediately directs attention away from Windows whatever version ! )

Personally when I read about Windows 7′s new “XP mode” I thought maybe Microsoft had grasped the problem and were putting a sensible solution in place to enable them to free themselves from the shackles of backward compatibility without losing too many customers along the way ( clearly nothing innovative here as this is what Apple did by rolling OS 9 into OS X when it was released in 2000 ), however when I read the full gen on this and realised that this “slick” integration actually requires you to install Virtual PC and then XP and then Antivirus and firewall software for XP etc I was forced to concede that yet again Microsoft have completely missed the point !

Sorry Redmond but I think you have some tough times ahead and some tough decisions to make, and to be honest I think I agree with Daniel that from past history it is unlikely you will make the right ones.