It is exactly the same as Windows 7 in same time after launch. And that was following Vista.

This is true.

Someone big needs to jump into the desktop area with both feet and Linux will win.

Look at virtually every other computing market: servers, mobile, embedded, etc. Linux dominates.

A better statistic would be to find out what percentage of new PC purchasers would pay a bit more for a Windows 7 downgrade.

C'mon, Microsoft. We dare you to make that offer. The statistics would be helpful, even to you.

The few people actually using Windows 8 are those who had it shoved up their ass as a mandatory corporate upgrade, or other similar situations.

Now is the perfect time to be against MSFT and AAPL, because both corporations have nowhere to go but down. Though at least Apple gan get away with claiming that they're stuff is higher-end. Microsoft just shoves money up peoples' ass to upgrade and blitz ads, but its credibility is so laughable that not even that will reassure people that everything that flies out their doors is crap.

Plus, I had sex with a menstruating woman last night. Had her knees on my shoulders and a towel laid out. Was quite surprised when i went to take a piss this morning and found a big gob of blood on the crotch-area of the toilet seat. You're not a real man until you ride the red road.

-- Ethanol-fueled

Actually, aside from the US, why would Samsung even do an RT tablet anywhere, when they have one of the most successful Android products in both the Galaxy phone & the Galaxy tab?

If they wanted, it might make sense for them to do an Atom/Fusion based Windows 8 tablet, and that would probably be the only good platform for Windows 8 in that it will be able to run Wintel apps as well.

Windows RT will be an even bigger fiasco than either Windows NT on RISC (Alpha, MIPS) or Windows Server 2008 on Itanium ever was.

Samsung is not bringing the latest Galaxy either because of Apple. Sometimes losing is cheaper than fighting in court as Apple are frankly assholes who already sued and won $ 1,000,000,000 judgement already. The shareholders will not put up with that anymore.

If this is not proof that Apple is far more evil than MS I do not know what is. At least in 2013 my anti-MS zealotry I had 12 years ago is gone. I used to post comments opposite of what I write today about the evils of MS.

But today I want to see more WindowsRT tablets to keep Android, IOS, and Webkit in check for a healthier marketplace. I doubt MS will be what it once was with this competition but I believe we all benefit even if we are loyal IOS or Android users.

A shame as Samsung made fine phones and tablets

Actually its such a failwhale I seriously doubt it'll even get third, more likely a distant fourth. first will be either iOS or Android 4, next will be the one of those two who doesn't have the top spot that week, followed by Android 2.x which while starting to finally die out still has a pretty good share, and finally MSFT WinRT. Honestly if you count the Symbian units still being sold most likely MSFT would make fifth since the sales of Surface are so bad they had to cut their order in half [bgr.com] and it looks like they sold less than a million units for the fourth quarter, that is just terrible numbers.

Seriously how many negative indicators is it gonna take for the board to put down the crack pipe and fire the Ballmernator? The man has wasted something like 40 BILLION in the past 6 years on failed ventures, his few successes certainly haven't even wiped all the red ink from his bad moves, much less made a profit, honestly they would have had a better return with no strategy at all, just putting the money into T-Bills or blue chip stocks. When even Forbes is calling the 00s "MSFT's lost decade" and naming the Ballmernator worst CEO, how much more proof do you really need? the man is an unmitigated disaster and I bet if you compared how much money the Pepsi guy lost for Apple with what Ballmer has blown on harebrained ideas like Zune, Kin, Sidekick, Bing, etc Ballmer would make the Pepsi guy look like Steve jobs, he is THAT bad.

Mandatory corporate upgrade? I haven't heard of any corporations that are moving all of their users to Windows 8, but I guess they may exist. It's my understanding that corps like to wait it out and make sure that everything works before moving over (thus why many are only now moving to Windows 7).

For myself, I bought Windows 8 because it was less than a third of the cost of Windows 7, and Internet hyperbole aside, it behaves basically the same way as Windows 7 in all the ways that actually matter. I actually prefer it over 7 (if you care enough to know why, it's in my posting history...somewhere...).

If you dump mass licenses of W8 to OEMs with W7 downgrade rights this is going to happen. They save up millions of licenses and bring down their costs - they have to to remain competitive. But this has nothing to do with which version of the software gets delivered to the customer, nor how popular it is.

Go to dell.com or HP.com and look at their premium desktops. Windows 7 gets top billing still and Windows 8 is an option. In HP's case there are more preconfigured options with SUSE Linux than Windows 8. In Dell's case not one system comes with Windows 8 by default.

Because of the large numbers of those that are immediately downgraded back to 7 by corporate customers?

8's actual usage is pathetic.

Windows is very different. It is a set of very tightly integrated libraries, which has its benefits, but they all need to be scaled down to work on ARM, you cannot just swap out some resource hungry component for some open source project because the system is so interdependent. Scaling down software is much harder than scaling it up.

I am not a fan of WinRT and some of the decisions made, but this is total bullshit.

With every year that passes, there is more and more distance between the performance of current machines (even ARM ones) and the performance of those that Windows NT ran smoothly on when it was first introduced in 1993. The performance of the base operating system and its core user mode components on low-end hardware is not the problem. The problem is the shitty, incomplete, half-baked tiled thingy they put on top of it, and the decision to cripple its available APIs in a feeble attempt to copy Apple's iOS brain damage. That part was produced in 3 years by some not very capable people. (I used to work at MS and I know some of them.)

Microsoft is releasing their new Surface devices in the wrong order. Instead of bringing RT devices to market, and then Windows 8, they should've ONLY released full Windows 8 devices, let people become familiar with the dual paradigm, waited for the app store to fill up nicely, THEN came out with the RT devices, which would be much more appealing if they had plenty of software available, and if people were already accustomed to getting things done in RT mode.

As things are now, RT has been tainted, possibly irreparably. Maybe it could be saved if it had the ability to run Windows Phone 8 apps. Why that was not part of the plan seems like a huge failure to me.