For Microsoft, this is about more than just responding to the iPad. It’s the company’s next computing paradigm, a change as fundamental as the transition from DOS to Windows. The thing that made the Windows transition work was that Microsoft protected the customers’ investment in old applications and data. You could keep using your old DOS applications while you gradually got used to Windows.

So users will have an interesting choice. Apple, with iOS, is making a clean break with the past. So are Chrome and Web OS. Microsoft is trying to cherry-pick the best of iOS and WebOS and Chrome, and wrap that into a product that’s also backward-compatible. Let’s see, cleaner design versus backward compatible…where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, Mac vs. Windows, 1990.

…Old Windows apps running inside Windows 8 do look awful. But so did DOS inside Windows 3.0, and that didn’t stop people from buying it.