yeah, Microsoft's main competitive shortcoming against Apple in desktop strategy is twofold: - Apple can let OS X be its loss leader, whereas Microsoft doesn't

yeah, Microsoft's main competitive shortcoming against Apple in desktop strategy is twofold: - Apple can let OS X be its loss leader, whereas Microsoft doesn't have a thing to let Windows be a loss leader for (the Windows Store, maybe, post-8?) - breaking backward compatibility hurts Microsoft's sales, since there's no single source of application updates, and since so many Windows licenses are in the enterprise; it doesn't affect Apple's sales (maybe even helps them) because it sells shiny new Macs for shiny new features and because Apple doesn't live or die on OS X revenue. its saving grace is that retail sales of Windows licenses are probably dominated by people refreshing their computers.