I'd say the only flaw in your argument is that if there's not a realistic alternative, they're free to keep on failing again and again, but they'll keep making money because for many markets, there's nowhere else to go. To play devil's advocate, I've heard the "MS is going to fail because x,y,z" a LONG time. I'd love to be wrong, but I'm not seeing the scenario where they have to pay the price for their actions, particularly on the desktop.MS refuses to wake up and play their strengths on the desktop/business OS market and move into the supposed promise land of cloud computing. They want to control it all and make it all software as a service. No creativity on the UI front and as usual none on the software/hardware front. They've gotta follow the hype train from high to low. It will lead to big failure instead of just failure on the phones, games live, windows RT etc..