IDC blames Win8 for the imploding pc market Its a no brainier that changing\removing a familiar interface would spark a decrease in sales or upgrades. Its sheer MSFT arrogance and laziness to not keep the product appeal to it long standing customers. Linux allows customers to use the interfaces of choice ... MSFT resisted that experience. Its clear that some of the customers are seeking alternatives to bring back the old interface. Office2013 also contributed to the declines. They sort of killed some of the features people love in Office2003 to Office2007\2010 in favor of the new WPF practices while trying to push people to the subscription sales model. Some people are trying to stay in their respective office versions because changing to a new version would cost them more to update their macros, upgrade add-ins, upgrade to Win8. It becomes two fold in annoying customers to learn a new interface while losing features that gave them a certain kind of productivity. I looked at an old product ... the commodore amiga ... they tried to bring back that 1985 OS. The company folded as the pc dominated the market. Since then the OS went into three directions Unixish, fan supported, re-invent. Last year they came out with the Amiga Mini ... using Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a Blu-ray drive ... running on the knoppix\linux os The OS resembles very little of the old OS. It had a hefty price tag of $2500 vs Mac Mini in a similar config cost $1,317.00 Even bringing down the price by $500 didn't attract customers. The people who loved the orig OS is still trying to keep it alive. They was never upgraded the OS ... it still looks like that OS from 1985 running on MC68000 type processor or Emulation for $30 The Commodore website is down so I must presume they folded again while the die hard fans thrive. Sure there are other factors to the PC Implosion ... Its the era that people have choice to choose their computing n media needs. But the industry got to realize that not many can afford to buy every gadget (laptop, Tablet, smartphone, smartTV, etc) All these products happen to be in the similar price range (expensive) In the old days a PC had an average cost of 3250 + tv 750 + cell 100 = 4,100 now its laptop 750 + smartphone 750 + smartTv 750 + Tablet 750 + Security 100 + Misc 1000 = 4,100 There is only so much you can extract from the domestic market. Companies are force to compete for new market like Asian and South American Markets, new territories that they think will be their new pot of gold. But its not easy as we can see how tough these new areas are just by observing how Apple and other foreign companies are doing. The last part to affect the market is economics ... imagine 20million people can barely afford a gadget ... thats billions of dollars of lost revenue. Can we say that the companies are expecting to make up the difference on those that can afford? lol, the DVD and Video Store markets are imploding or imploded ... because of the change of the sales model of video n rentals. Yes, OnDemand sure did change those worlds ... soon we won't need a DVD ... perhaps soon we won't need a hard drive ... all on the cloud.