Is Microsoft yesterday's news?

Windows 7 was a hit, because ten million of us were made to feel that we had a small part in helping to create it. Windows 8 hasn't been like that because Mighty Microsoft went back to their old 'Father Knows Best' bullshit and forgot who is buying this stuff, and who is supposed to be selling the customer what he wants to buy, and listening to what the customer wants.

And what the customer wants isn't engineered obsolescence and hardware that doesn't do everything that he requires of it. The customer doesn't want to feel like he is being dictated to or treated like an idiot by the people who invented 'Patch Tuesday' and have to routinely issue corrections to rectify past mistakes
which they built into their system. The customer doesn't want to have to spend additional money beyond the cost of the software in order to protect it from security vulnerabilities inherent in it because of its design, formatting, and execution. There's more, but you get the point.

The open source and freeware community provides operating systems and programs which work every bit as well as Microsoft's if not better, and those don't seem to have half the ongoing problems we keep finding in Windows, nor are they as vulnerable to malware. Microsoft could learn from that, and should.

Is Microsoft 'over the hill'? Did they peak with Windows 7, and everything since is anticlimax? Is Windows 8 the reincarnation of the pain in the ass that was Vista? Why does it seem like every second new operating system is part of the problem rather than part of the solution? Doesn't anyone know how to play that game? One wonders! How can they hit one out of the park one inning, and then strike out the next? Can't they remember what they did right the last time?