Promoting from within will not help Microsoft overcome the public's thoughts on Windows 8. I wonder how he will deal with that mess.

Maybe someone from the outside without any preconceived ideas of what an OS is instead of what it should be and without those on the inside telling him or her what should or shouldn't be done?

Well he can't do any a worse job than Ballmer... well let's hope the fech not.  Ballmer was never the right man for the job because he had a background in business rather than IT/computing, and as such, I think he held back innovation, inventiveness and lateral thinking.  I like using Windows 8 and think it's a great OS, but I think it could have been a whole lot better if they didn't have a non-IT CEO sign off on it before the job was complete.  Now the guy who could have taken it to the next level and beyond, the engineer who designed it, was made the scapegoat when it was seen the adoption rate was so slow.

For mine, that was Ballmer's fault!  He wanted it out there ASAP and it failed because more needed to be done to make the average user want to upgrade to it.  It was poor from a software point of view, because of his business background, but it was also poor from a business sense.  The improvements that came with 8.1 made Windows 8 more palatable to a wider market, and essentially, Windows 8 should have been held up until those improvements were included in the original release.

Don't get me wrong, I like Win 8, but it was released too early and suffered a poorer than otherwise uptake as a result.  Had the lead engineer been given the time and free license to optimise it even more, I believe Windows 8 would have been so, so much better at 1st release.... not that we'll ever know now.  No, he was made the scapegoat and blamed for its failure, when in fact it was Ballmer who set it up to fail as a viable update to Win 7.

I think you're both [mostly] right.

The 'Business decision' to monopolize the GUI to maximize exposure/adoption was flawed.

Had the released 8 GUI been left to IT decision making the 'Business' result would have been better...

Yes, removing the traditional start menu was a big mistake, and it largely contributed to Win 8's dismal sales performance.  However, I believe the fault lies squarely with Ballmer there, and that Win 8 would have been a more polished and complete OS if the IT people working on it were able to do their jobs properly, within a better time frame than the one they were given.

I saw an interview with Win 8's lead engineer, Steve Sinofsky, and he stated that Win 8 would have been a different product had he been given license to effect the changes he wanted to implement.  He couldn't say a great deal [as in specifics] due to a non-disclosure agreement, but he believed Windows 9 would be a better, more refined OS for the work, used and unused, that he'd put into Win 8.

Thing is, Ballmer's not the head honcho over there anymore, and MS will be better for it.  This new bloke appears to have a backgound more in IT than business, which on face value, suggests a more IT-centric approach to the goings on at Redmond.... and maybe, just maybe, he can tempt Steve Sinofsky to rejoin the team.  Bill Gates once said that he was one of the most talented software engineers he'd ever met, so here's hoping cos it can only be good for us... the consumer.