Comment by compsciphd

I think Microsoft missed the boat with windows 8 in a manner that could have fundamentally changed computing and significantly undercut the ipad ecosystem.

Apple has bifurcated the ipad and desktop ecosystems (till today), while Microsoft with windows 8s felt that were would be no desktops in the future and everything would be tablet/touch based. Instead of writing mouse/keyboard friendly apps, developers would just write touch friendly apps. This failed.

What Microsoft could have done with windows 8 was create an environment that enabled developers to write apps that worked optimally in both touch and keyboard/mouse environments. Take a windows surface tablet, and place it in a dock, and all your running apps automatically switch to keyboard/mouse friendly mode. detach it from the dock, and all your apps automatically switch to touch friendly mode.

Instead we are still left in a world with a bifurcation. Even most (all?) major web browsers on windows (chrome, edge, firefox) don't do touch friendly that nicely. Some aren't so bad, but no where near as touch friendly as one sees for purpose built touch UIs.