I remember this: many of you are too young to realize but Apple did EXACTLY the same thing in the mid 90s. When they switched from PowerPC chips to Intel an OSX, they basically threw the finger to their ENTIRE USER BASE (no iPod or iPad at the time) and said "Switch or Die". They lost some market share, but they were losing anyway. They had to do SOMETHING to move ahead. Now look at them. This was the perfect time for Microsoft to do this. They proved they had a viable platform worth investing in (WP7 and WP7.5) to themselves AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, their partners. They did it at the time when the viable base was at it's absolute smallest (to avoid pissing off the least amount of people) and before trying to deeply integrate with a dissimilar core architecture (W8). They did this BEFORE everyone switched to W8 (in the next 2-3 years) and to complete their "3 screen" objective. If they did this anytime before this, it would have been questionable if all the resources required would have been worth the tiny marketshare they had before Nokia started spreading like a virus. Anytime after this time, they would have potentially pissed off A LOT more people and done some REAL damage. The change to a W8 core fixes many problems that would have been difficult to counter on other platforms (after all, it's basically a handheld PC with a smaller screen) and gives unique advantages (security, management, develop one codebase, etc.) If you remember, Microsoft rushed WP7 to market because they simply couldn't wait any longer to have even a prayer at getting any marketshare from Apple and Google (hence the new strategy of announcing things to keep people from buying other products even though they are not even close to finishing it for release). People need to stop getting their feelings hurt and realize that this is a business and sometimes hard decisions have to be made. They would have loved to keep dragging us along, but, in many ways, that is what is wrong with Windows as it is. The only difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Apple did it first (because it had to). There will probably be similar results (Apple has 5-6% of PC market, but owns tablets (if it stays true to form), and Microsoft will probably have <20% of phone market, but owns PCs). The difference is, the phone market is much bigger (not many people have more than one or two PCs in their home or at work, but every single person on the planet will soon have a phone), so Microsoft is pushing forward to try to capture that market. Everyone who makes a tool in this age will have to do something to this degree at some time (Look at Adobe Flash, Adobe is moving on and making tools for HTML5 now. The web is a constantly changing animal, more than any of this. What used to be done with .jpegs and .gifs is now done in CSS with code). There are casualties and people left out anytime this happens (Flash developers need new skills to be sure). Now is Microsoft's time.
-Lumia 900 user