I agree that the "unneeded and unused" is BS. The people who support Wayland are proposing eliminating network transparency in exchange for other advantages having to do with higher refresh rates. I agree with you it would be more honest to just say they believe on balance this is the right trade off. X existed when most modern GUIs which made the same tradeoffs were built. Wayland supporters are just saying that Commodore, Microsoft, Apple, IBM (OS/2),... were right and SGI, Sun, Digital, HP, IBM (AIX).. were wrong in figuring out the right balance of features. Wayland supporters are basically saying that ultimately, even in 2012, its all about ramming as many triangles through the video card as possible, and doing that with predictable timings; that anything that slows down those triangles, like networking must go overboard.
Similarly X has 30 year history of really really doing a bad job of delivering a smooth GUI experience. That while in theory the network protocol shouldn't cost much, in practice it often seems to complicate design tremendously. X supporters IMHO and experience have trouble often admitting how many GUI projects fail or take 10x longer than they should because of the complexity of working with the X / multiple window manager / multi GUI stack.
If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs. Because X servers can run on top of X it might be possible to even come to an agreement about which applications should remain network transparent and which shouldn't. I suspect most supporters of network transparency could care less if games and video editing software went local only. And I suspect that most supporters of wayland could care less if server monitoring and server installation software remained X forever. Longer term though the tradeoffs become real. Gnome and KDE will either be built around Wayland or built around X, its going to be impossible for them to do both well. If around Wayland then Linux will be a system of local GUIs with at best a few networkable applications. If around X then Wayland will be a hack run in place of the GUI or only in full screen mode, for real time rendering.
The big piece of evidence is the failure of network transparency to become a killer feature of Linux. I started using X in '88 and was using it daily by '92. I thought X was amazingly cool the ability to send windows around change displays. I've seen corporate settings where these features are integrated into applications and made real use of. And certainly for system administration the ability to run X applications remotely has been useful particular to monitor. I thought this would be Linux's killer feature.
But in the end, X network transparency doesn't work very well over Wan. It doesn't work very well over MPLS. In general it doesn't work all that well for the situations where you couldn't just be using some sort of remote solution. X wasn't able to handle the security problems and so the whole infrastructure of remote X and remote shells has gotten more complex and thus less useful. So today even Linux apps use a web interface or a thick java client to do client server work. Which means network transparency failed to deliver an alternative to client server. I still use it a couple times a year, I certainly think its better than what you get on non network transparent GUIs when trying to operate them remotely. But ultimately if network transparency doesn't let you avoid the problems of web or thick clients, what's the point?
The main thing about Wayland is allowing applications to control drawing and make judgements like they do on non-network transparent systems. That technology works and is important. For simple apps that work well over WAN today there is no reason for them to ever move away from X, and Wayland will support X. But for the rest, something is better than nothing. Yes it is a pity that network transparency couldn't or wasn't made to deliver on its potential.
There is no good reason that traditional applications should have flexibility that's lacking in Metro. Metro adds functionality it doesn't subtract it. There may be apps that don't choose to upgrade or that get lost in the shuffle. There were DOS apps I liked that never migrated to Windows. There were Classic apps that never migrated to OSX.
Hmm interesting. It was about 2 years behind the Digital workstations. Vorbis seems more mainstream and '97 was late to be getting into the game. I'm very curious what that was about.
That's a good answer. But today is the equivalent of early 2007 with respect to the iPhone. You couldn't have pointed to apps then that were better. What the iPhone had in 2007 was potential, the potential to make the web wonderful while mobile.
And since you aren't going to hear this from many people. I agree with the direction you guys are taking. I don't know whether Metro works out or not. But I'm glad to see Microsoft exercising leadership for x86 again. I like the direction this is going to push hardware and then applications. Good luck.
1) 4gigs is mostly data not program. 2) programs are constantly saving state 3) The drives are 450mb / sec.
So if an app closes it can reload the piece I was working on in tenths of a second. I don't experience delays. My laptop is really not too different than if I had 200gigs of ram and was running all my applications.
Why? Who's going to want a touchscreen on a laptop or desktop system?
Me. I'm a longtime Apple customer. The only Windows feature I want is a hinge and touchscreen like they have on the Fujitsu laptop, with Microsoft One note. I'd pay $500 for that in a heartbeat. I use mind managers to try and get the fluidity of adhoc communication but a system genuinely built for it?
End users weren't excited by Windows 286 when Microsoft started the transition from DOS. They were happy on DOS.
They know they are going to lose share at first. If this works Microsoft is going to have something better than Apple. If it doesn't they lose consumer. If they don't do anything they are dead in consumer soon enough anyway.
1) They have lost the top of the consumer market to Apple 2) They are losing the bottom of the market to iOS and Android 3) Hardware improvements on Arm are coming quickly and will carry the software forward.
Thus 1) The problem is going to get worse 2) They are far better off fighting Google as soon as possible.
I wouldn't say medium, assuming by medium we are talking 300-10k employees. I think that their innovations have been perfect for this group. They've been bring all sorts of technologies like universal communication which were common in companies with 30k employees to companies with 500 employees.
If you meant medium smaller then yes. As far as small, no question home / small business is starving. But that's starting to change. Microsoft offering their server products in the cloud on a per employee basis (i.e. starting with Office365 and mail) is huge for this group.
Except the netbook story was all about their fear of ceding anything anywhere to Linux. Now they seem to be changing that strategy.
I understand and I agree. I think they are drawing the wrong lesson from the netbook's easy collapse. Had they waited another year or two the situation might have been different. But that's not the way they see it.
Look what happened to both traditional UNIX and Windows NT's designs on the server when they both failed to take the threat of the penguin seriously.
NT has been gaining well on servers. Linux has been killing off all their commercial competitors and creating huge gaps for NT to move into. For example look at the percentage of data warehouses on SQLServer. Pretty much if you aren't using a dozen processors or more at this point you are running NT or Linux. I don't know if Microsoft is unhappy with how the server market played out. In terms of spend:
IBM is getting the top 2% Linux is getting the bottom 40% Microsoft is getting everything in-between.
And a few MIPS more was still considered a big deal back then, one well-known retailer even tried to market an Alpha machine in a PC case to private end users.
I think you mean Digital (DEC) which had an Alpha based workstation. And it was amazing. Intel copied a huge amount of Alpha technology into their CPUs which killed the potential but make DEC some money.
As far as I can remember, falling behind on the hardware side in the 1990s had a lot to do with their demise. There was a quite rapid development on the PC side which Commodore and Atari could not quite follow.
It happened earlier than that. http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/20-01-2012-12-11-21.png But yes, that's what they are worried about. And incidentally the rapid development on the phone side is what is terrifying Balmer today. Today's cell phones are only about a decade behind x86 machines and gaining rapidly.
You are right, StatCounter GlobalStats shows them at 13% in North America for OS operating systems (7% worldwide), with a long term trend towards more. And I don't even have the impression that their main focus is on the desktop. Sounds like a competitor whom Microsoft doesn't want to open more doors
Yep. And it not equally distributed. They currently are well over 90% of all computers over $1000 in consumer. And the data you are looking at doesn't include the iOS iPad. Apple is a competitor that's attacking them at the high end and the low end simultaneously and squeezing them into a narrower and narrower box. Microsoft has 2 things going for them with Apple.
1) Right now at least Apple cannot for the next 2 years move down market below the $1000 price point since their strategic direction is retina which is going to require more expensive screens, batteries and video cards on their inexpensive line of computers.
2a) Apple hates enterprise. 2b) Apple's brand identify is alienating to large numbers of Americans.
But Google with Android doesn't have any of those problems in (2).
But then again, Microsoft acted fast in the netbook "affair". There was some short-lived interest in Linux, but Linux never got anywhere near 5% of the installed base, let alone 30%. With more market share, it might get more of the network effects as well and the change might be permanent.
Agreed. This is a risky play for Microsoft. They don't see it that way.
KDE is still desktop oriented. Further Cinnamon and Mate exist for a Gnome offering. Gnome 3 has gone that way and Canonical. And the most popular QT interface at this point is shifting towards MeeGo interface which is tablet oriented so who knows? But IMHO Linux has no shortage of good traditional desktops.
OpenOffice has been gaining marketshare quickly as a reaction against ribbon (and I say this as someone who supports ribbon).
As an aside during the Vista fiasco, Linux did well on netbook for about 8 months. Microsoft crushed it via. cutting the price to almost 0 (or possibly a negative number) and offering XP. I don't know if sound was really the problem so much as not having apps that ran well at resolutions like 1024x600.
Microsoft isn't worried about organizations yet. They aren't have a problem in enterprise at all. And in the last decade they have pulled way ahead of Linux in terms of enterprise offerings. Linux has nothing like Universal Communicator or Dynamics.
Their problem is in home / small business. And Linux is quite suitable for a home / small business computer. Once people get used to getting a computer with hundreds of free applications the paucity of software on Windows might be a real problem. That's how Linux beat Sun incidentally for workstation / development. Solaris was way better than Linux as a core OS but RedHat and Debian were so much better as complete solutions that Solaris became the choice only for the server related work. And then of course once people were developing on servers then only those servers where x86 couldn't handle the load. And as x86 got better that narrowed to an ever decreasing niche that was too small to sustain server Unixes.
Linux will get its first crack since netbook. Though now that MeeGo has been sold off, that might be another vehicle. MeeGo is really quite nice.
Mac has already had this for years. Objective-C / Cocoa is used for both desktop and phone. Lots of the code is shared and in fact the most advanced parts of iCloud make use of "CoreData" which implies the low level data / filesystem interface is shared between the desktop and phone versions. Where Apple differs is that they have a community that considers UI more important than price and uniformity so they demand different UI's for everything optimized for the hardware. Apple users are a total PIA to develop for, but they are willing to overpay for software which helps to ease the pain:)
Realistically for the next few years at least Windows phone isn't going to be the most familiar UI for people coming from a phone anyways so why mimic it on a desktop?
Because they want to retire the old interface. The old interface doesn't allow for ubiquitous computing. Microsoft needs to send an unambiguous message to their developer community and hardware community that Windows 7 is legacy and being retired. Steve Jobs fought these battles 1997-2002 to get his developers to take him seriously. Now Balmer is going to need to fight them for the next decade (since he can't move nearly as fast). Staying with traditional apps is going to get more and more and more painful.
having said there, there is zero good reason to disable the "classic" option they have had from the very start.
Of course these is a good reason. Its the same thing Apple does when they shift technologies. They want to encourage developers to use the Metro style interface by sending a clear signal they are making the old one legacy. Part of that is making the old technology less and less and less pleasant for end users so that they push developers.
You might see something like Windows 9: old interface requires separate installation\. Windows 10: old interface requires a separate license or an upgrade. COM doesn't run at all. Windows 11: old interface only runs in a virtual machine and requires older version of the operating system etc...
Corporate customers are going to sold Windows 7. Microsoft doesn't have a problem in Enterprise and in enterprise they are still working through the XP -> 7 shift.
Windows 8 can be tepid. It is a transitional OS. It gives the Hardware manufacturers and application developers something to target. Windows 9 will be much futher along. Windows 8 is like Windows 286 during the DOS transition.
Microsoft has been very innovative in the last decade. But the bulk of the innovation has been in the server, enterprise space with products like Dynamics. For a long time, consumer desktop has just been deciding which enterprise desktop feature to cut and which to include. Now that consumer desktop is under real threat, they are focusing innovation there.
I'm just glad to have Microsoft acting like a leader again instead of letting the x86 platform drift aimlessly. Whether they are right or wrong its nice to see vision.
it's still extremely inefficient in terms of movement required without a touchscreen input. This becomes problematic when proper ergonomic viewing distance for even a 22" screen is usually beyond arm's length.
You can actually have different types of detectors so that pointing at something is detected. There is no reason you couldn't detect an electostatic field in front of the monitor, extending the touchscreen out beyond a few millimeters to several feet. There are already capacitive styli that do this, and HTC has a patent for one you can wear on your pointer finger. Going well beyond current technology, look at MS Office's long term vision starting at around 2:56 which shows that sort of screen.
If they alienate too many desktop users, Apple, Linux and Open Source in general may get enough of a boost to come out of the 5% marketshare corner (on the desktop) and seriously threaten Microsoft's traditional cash cows. Interesting times ahead:-)
Apple is already by some counts at 12%. They know and expect to lose a lot more than 5%. If the bottom 30% of the market goes to Linux that won't be a shock. But remember Microsoft did beat Commodore and Atari before. They know how to take on a consumer product with lower prices and less features overall. They beat Linux back on netbooks. I think they believe they can safely give share to Linux.
What they are much more concerned with is giving share to Android and iOS 5 years from now in a way that is permanent.
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I agree that the "unneeded and unused" is BS. The people who support Wayland are proposing eliminating network transparency in exchange for other advantages having to do with higher refresh rates. I agree with you it would be more honest to just say they believe on balance this is the right trade off. X existed when most modern GUIs which made the same tradeoffs were built. Wayland supporters are just saying that Commodore, Microsoft, Apple, IBM (OS/2),... were right and SGI, Sun, Digital, HP, IBM (AIX).. were wrong in figuring out the right balance of features. Wayland supporters are basically saying that ultimately, even in 2012, its all about ramming as many triangles through the video card as possible, and doing that with predictable timings; that anything that slows down those triangles, like networking must go overboard.
Similarly X has 30 year history of really really doing a bad job of delivering a smooth GUI experience. That while in theory the network protocol shouldn't cost much, in practice it often seems to complicate design tremendously. X supporters IMHO and experience have trouble often admitting how many GUI projects fail or take 10x longer than they should because of the complexity of working with the X / multiple window manager / multi GUI stack.
If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs. Because X servers can run on top of X it might be possible to even come to an agreement about which applications should remain network transparent and which shouldn't. I suspect most supporters of network transparency could care less if games and video editing software went local only. And I suspect that most supporters of wayland could care less if server monitoring and server installation software remained X forever. Longer term though the tradeoffs become real. Gnome and KDE will either be built around Wayland or built around X, its going to be impossible for them to do both well. If around Wayland then Linux will be a system of local GUIs with at best a few networkable applications. If around X then Wayland will be a hack run in place of the GUI or only in full screen mode, for real time rendering.
The big piece of evidence is the failure of network transparency to become a killer feature of Linux. I started using X in '88 and was using it daily by '92. I thought X was amazingly cool the ability to send windows around change displays. I've seen corporate settings where these features are integrated into applications and made real use of. And certainly for system administration the ability to run X applications remotely has been useful particular to monitor. I thought this would be Linux's killer feature.
But in the end, X network transparency doesn't work very well over Wan. It doesn't work very well over MPLS. In general it doesn't work all that well for the situations where you couldn't just be using some sort of remote solution. X wasn't able to handle the security problems and so the whole infrastructure of remote X and remote shells has gotten more complex and thus less useful. So today even Linux apps use a web interface or a thick java client to do client server work. Which means network transparency failed to deliver an alternative to client server. I still use it a couple times a year, I certainly think its better than what you get on non network transparent GUIs when trying to operate them remotely. But ultimately if network transparency doesn't let you avoid the problems of web or thick clients, what's the point?
The main thing about Wayland is allowing applications to control drawing and make judgements like they do on non-network transparent systems. That technology works and is important. For simple apps that work well over WAN today there is no reason for them to ever move away from X, and Wayland will support X. But for the rest, something is better than nothing. Yes it is a pity that network transparency couldn't or wasn't made to deliver on its potential.
There is no good reason that traditional applications should have flexibility that's lacking in Metro. Metro adds functionality it doesn't subtract it. There may be apps that don't choose to upgrade or that get lost in the shuffle. There were DOS apps I liked that never migrated to Windows. There were Classic apps that never migrated to OSX.
Hmm interesting. It was about 2 years behind the Digital workstations. Vorbis seems more mainstream and '97 was late to be getting into the game. I'm very curious what that was about.
gig --
That's a good answer. But today is the equivalent of early 2007 with respect to the iPhone. You couldn't have pointed to apps then that were better. What the iPhone had in 2007 was potential, the potential to make the web wonderful while mobile.
Let me just say that was a brave post.
And since you aren't going to hear this from many people. I agree with the direction you guys are taking. I don't know whether Metro works out or not. But I'm glad to see Microsoft exercising leadership for x86 again. I like the direction this is going to push hardware and then applications. Good luck.
Apple does make a $500 laptop, the iPad. The Air is mostly a low end device. Their high end devices are the pros which start at $1200.
That's exactly what happens on my retina today.
1) 4gigs is mostly data not program.
2) programs are constantly saving state
3) The drives are 450mb / sec.
So if an app closes it can reload the piece I was working on in tenths of a second. I don't experience delays. My laptop is really not too different than if I had 200gigs of ram and was running all my applications.
Why? Who's going to want a touchscreen on a laptop or desktop system?
Me. I'm a longtime Apple customer. The only Windows feature I want is a hinge and touchscreen like they have on the Fujitsu laptop, with Microsoft One note. I'd pay $500 for that in a heartbeat. I use mind managers to try and get the fluidity of adhoc communication but a system genuinely built for it?
End users weren't excited by Windows 286 when Microsoft started the transition from DOS. They were happy on DOS.
They know they are going to lose share at first. If this works Microsoft is going to have something better than Apple. If it doesn't they lose consumer. If they don't do anything they are dead in consumer soon enough anyway.
I'm not following the marketing strategy.
1) They have lost the top of the consumer market to Apple
2) They are losing the bottom of the market to iOS and Android
3) Hardware improvements on Arm are coming quickly and will carry the software forward.
Thus
1) The problem is going to get worse
2) They are far better off fighting Google as soon as possible.
If you agree so far let me know.
I wouldn't say medium, assuming by medium we are talking 300-10k employees. I think that their innovations have been perfect for this group. They've been bring all sorts of technologies like universal communication which were common in companies with 30k employees to companies with 500 employees.
If you meant medium smaller then yes. As far as small, no question home / small business is starving. But that's starting to change. Microsoft offering their server products in the cloud on a per employee basis (i.e. starting with Office365 and mail) is huge for this group.
Except the netbook story was all about their fear of ceding anything anywhere to Linux. Now they seem to be changing that strategy.
I understand and I agree. I think they are drawing the wrong lesson from the netbook's easy collapse. Had they waited another year or two the situation might have been different. But that's not the way they see it.
Look what happened to both traditional UNIX and Windows NT's designs on the server when they both failed to take the threat of the penguin seriously.
NT has been gaining well on servers. Linux has been killing off all their commercial competitors and creating huge gaps for NT to move into. For example look at the percentage of data warehouses on SQLServer. Pretty much if you aren't using a dozen processors or more at this point you are running NT or Linux. I don't know if Microsoft is unhappy with how the server market played out. In terms of spend:
IBM is getting the top 2%
Linux is getting the bottom 40%
Microsoft is getting everything in-between.
What's not to like?
And a few MIPS more was still considered a big deal back then, one well-known retailer even tried to market an Alpha machine in a PC case to private end users.
I think you mean Digital (DEC) which had an Alpha based workstation. And it was amazing. Intel copied a huge amount of Alpha technology into their CPUs which killed the potential but make DEC some money.
As far as I can remember, falling behind on the hardware side in the 1990s had a lot to do with their demise. There was a quite rapid development on the PC side which Commodore and Atari could not quite follow.
It happened earlier than that. http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/20-01-2012-12-11-21.png But yes, that's what they are worried about. And incidentally the rapid development on the phone side is what is terrifying Balmer today. Today's cell phones are only about a decade behind x86 machines and gaining rapidly.
You are right, StatCounter GlobalStats shows them at 13% in North America for OS operating systems (7% worldwide), with a long term trend towards more. And I don't even have the impression that their main focus is on the desktop. Sounds like a competitor whom Microsoft doesn't want to open more doors
Yep. And it not equally distributed. They currently are well over 90% of all computers over $1000 in consumer. And the data you are looking at doesn't include the iOS iPad. Apple is a competitor that's attacking them at the high end and the low end simultaneously and squeezing them into a narrower and narrower box. Microsoft has 2 things going for them with Apple.
1) Right now at least Apple cannot for the next 2 years move down market below the $1000 price point since their strategic direction is retina which is going to require more expensive screens, batteries and video cards on their inexpensive line of computers.
2a) Apple hates enterprise.
2b) Apple's brand identify is alienating to large numbers of Americans.
But Google with Android doesn't have any of those problems in (2).
But then again, Microsoft acted fast in the netbook "affair". There was some short-lived interest in Linux, but Linux never got anywhere near 5% of the installed base, let alone 30%. With more market share, it might get more of the network effects as well and the change might be permanent.
Agreed. This is a risky play for Microsoft. They don't see it that way.
KDE is still desktop oriented. Further Cinnamon and Mate exist for a Gnome offering. Gnome 3 has gone that way and Canonical. And the most popular QT interface at this point is shifting towards MeeGo interface which is tablet oriented so who knows? But IMHO Linux has no shortage of good traditional desktops.
OpenOffice has been gaining marketshare quickly as a reaction against ribbon (and I say this as someone who supports ribbon).
As an aside during the Vista fiasco, Linux did well on netbook for about 8 months. Microsoft crushed it via. cutting the price to almost 0 (or possibly a negative number) and offering XP. I don't know if sound was really the problem so much as not having apps that ran well at resolutions like 1024x600.
Microsoft isn't worried about organizations yet. They aren't have a problem in enterprise at all. And in the last decade they have pulled way ahead of Linux in terms of enterprise offerings. Linux has nothing like Universal Communicator or Dynamics.
Their problem is in home / small business. And Linux is quite suitable for a home / small business computer. Once people get used to getting a computer with hundreds of free applications the paucity of software on Windows might be a real problem. That's how Linux beat Sun incidentally for workstation / development. Solaris was way better than Linux as a core OS but RedHat and Debian were so much better as complete solutions that Solaris became the choice only for the server related work. And then of course once people were developing on servers then only those servers where x86 couldn't handle the load. And as x86 got better that narrowed to an ever decreasing niche that was too small to sustain server Unixes.
Linux will get its first crack since netbook. Though now that MeeGo has been sold off, that might be another vehicle. MeeGo is really quite nice.
Mac has already had this for years. Objective-C / Cocoa is used for both desktop and phone. Lots of the code is shared and in fact the most advanced parts of iCloud make use of "CoreData" which implies the low level data / filesystem interface is shared between the desktop and phone versions. Where Apple differs is that they have a community that considers UI more important than price and uniformity so they demand different UI's for everything optimized for the hardware. Apple users are a total PIA to develop for, but they are willing to overpay for software which helps to ease the pain :)
Realistically for the next few years at least Windows phone isn't going to be the most familiar UI for people coming from a phone anyways so why mimic it on a desktop?
Because they want to retire the old interface. The old interface doesn't allow for ubiquitous computing. Microsoft needs to send an unambiguous message to their developer community and hardware community that Windows 7 is legacy and being retired. Steve Jobs fought these battles 1997-2002 to get his developers to take him seriously. Now Balmer is going to need to fight them for the next decade (since he can't move nearly as fast). Staying with traditional apps is going to get more and more and more painful.
having said there, there is zero good reason to disable the "classic" option they have had from the very start.
Of course these is a good reason. Its the same thing Apple does when they shift technologies. They want to encourage developers to use the Metro style interface by sending a clear signal they are making the old one legacy. Part of that is making the old technology less and less and less pleasant for end users so that they push developers.
You might see something like
Windows 9: old interface requires separate installation\.
Windows 10: old interface requires a separate license or an upgrade. COM doesn't run at all.
Windows 11: old interface only runs in a virtual machine and requires older version of the operating system
etc...
Corporate customers are going to sold Windows 7. Microsoft doesn't have a problem in Enterprise and in enterprise they are still working through the XP -> 7 shift.
Windows 8 can be tepid. It is a transitional OS. It gives the Hardware manufacturers and application developers something to target. Windows 9 will be much futher along. Windows 8 is like Windows 286 during the DOS transition.
iPad2 and 3 aren't the real threat for cheap. There are Asian Android tablets as low as $25. They are crap but the quality is coming up fast.
Microsoft has been very innovative in the last decade. But the bulk of the innovation has been in the server, enterprise space with products like Dynamics. For a long time, consumer desktop has just been deciding which enterprise desktop feature to cut and which to include. Now that consumer desktop is under real threat, they are focusing innovation there.
I'm just glad to have Microsoft acting like a leader again instead of letting the x86 platform drift aimlessly. Whether they are right or wrong its nice to see vision.
it's still extremely inefficient in terms of movement required without a touchscreen input. This becomes problematic when proper ergonomic viewing distance for even a 22" screen is usually beyond arm's length.
You can actually have different types of detectors so that pointing at something is detected. There is no reason you couldn't detect an electostatic field in front of the monitor, extending the touchscreen out beyond a few millimeters to several feet. There are already capacitive styli that do this, and HTC has a patent for one you can wear on your pointer finger. Going well beyond current technology, look at MS Office's long term vision starting at around 2:56 which shows that sort of screen.
Homebuilt PCs aren't part of the high end, how much margin do you think anyone made on your machine?
If they alienate too many desktop users, Apple, Linux and Open Source in general may get enough of a boost to come out of the 5% marketshare corner (on the desktop) and seriously threaten Microsoft's traditional cash cows. Interesting times ahead :-)
Apple is already by some counts at 12%. They know and expect to lose a lot more than 5%. If the bottom 30% of the market goes to Linux that won't be a shock. But remember Microsoft did beat Commodore and Atari before. They know how to take on a consumer product with lower prices and less features overall. They beat Linux back on netbooks. I think they believe they can safely give share to Linux.
What they are much more concerned with is giving share to Android and iOS 5 years from now in a way that is permanent.