microsoft has long quoted user studies and user preferences in order to justify questionable features, which more often then not, are then abandoned for the next big thing(tm) in defiance of such claimed studies/preferences. remember that they fail as often as they succeed.
so don't worry about it so much. they're doing this due to the incredible success that apple has had with the ipad and iphone, and the amazon kindle, of course. the lesson that such sales volume cannot be replicated by anyone other than apple and amazon themselves has been received by some of the smarter players who have discontinued their tablet products, but microsoft is a lumbering monster that does not shift directions quickly. it's taken them so long to come up with a (poor and ugly) solution to a product category for which there is very little market, and in the process they have - wrongly - decided that instead of metro and the classic desktop being equal class citizens you can switch from freely, they're betting the big money is in touch computing. yes, that may be true, but not for the likes of intel and microsoft. that boat has sailed. wait for windows 9 to see metro having the same relevance that vista widgets now enjoy in w7 - legacy status.
so why are you worried? simply skip windows 8 on the desktop, not only it would not help you at all on a pc, it actually hinders traditional usage and reduces the usefulness and investment in multicore/multiprocessor systems by forcing the user to single/serial tasking like they would on a tablet. besides, there's absolutely nothing that the next generation of windows brings to the party that is worth the upgrade aside from the new filesystem, which, ridiculously, is not going to ship in the box anyway, and which will eventually trickle down to w7 in any case, it has to.
seriously, aside from refs what would you get w8 for? the updated task manager? the copy/move dialog? the ribbon on explorer? let's be serious here. go get a free replacement for those components that will offer you similar or greater functionality.
so don't worry about it so much. they're doing this due to the incredible success that apple has had with the ipad and iphone, and the amazon kindle, of course. the lesson that such sales volume cannot be replicated by anyone other than apple and amazon themselves has been received by some of the smarter players who have discontinued their tablet products, but microsoft is a lumbering monster that does not shift directions quickly. it's taken them so long to come up with a (poor and ugly) solution to a product category for which there is very little market, and in the process they have - wrongly - decided that instead of metro and the classic desktop being equal class citizens you can switch from freely, they're betting the big money is in touch computing. yes, that may be true, but not for the likes of intel and microsoft. that boat has sailed. wait for windows 9 to see metro having the same relevance that vista widgets now enjoy in w7 - legacy status.
so why are you worried? simply skip windows 8 on the desktop, not only it would not help you at all on a pc, it actually hinders traditional usage and reduces the usefulness and investment in multicore/multiprocessor systems by forcing the user to single/serial tasking like they would on a tablet. besides, there's absolutely nothing that the next generation of windows brings to the party that is worth the upgrade aside from the new filesystem, which, ridiculously, is not going to ship in the box anyway, and which will eventually trickle down to w7 in any case, it has to.
seriously, aside from refs what would you get w8 for? the updated task manager? the copy/move dialog? the ribbon on explorer? let's be serious here. go get a free replacement for those components that will offer you similar or greater functionality.