Yes, we are swimming in the old way Windows effects our lives. The new Windows is still being used by the vast majority of users the way they always have. Meaning, the average user doesn't use the Microsoft store, even when they know it exists. In my office, not one single person but me has downloaded an app from the Microsoft app store. Why? Their reply, "Because I can just download what I need from the web. Why do I need an app store?" Or, "oh, I just went to the Spotify website and downloaded the Spotify player." Consumers don't see the computer on their desk translating to the phone in their hand. Every computer in my office still has the start menu set up the way it came. None of them have changed it even after seeing the way I use mine. They still have a taskbar or desktop full of icons. The average user doesn't do live tiles. Even my wife who used windows phone for years still hasn't set up her computer's start screen. She also has never used the windows store on a computer. Android and IOS are the familiar handheld, smartphone, in your pocket OS. People jumping from Android/iOS to Windows on a phone, it is very unfamiliar, and would take a lot of getting used to. I'm not saying one is better than another, they are just different. And different enough they aren't willing to change when android/ios does everything they need it to. From another perspective, there are some iphone users who don't know how to use a Mac. There might be some familiar elements and some familiar programs. Generally casual iphone users don't switch to Macs just because they use iphones. Some might, but there wasn't a mass migration to macOS when the iphone came out. There also isn't a mass migration to Chromebooks even though Android is now the dominant Operating system worldwide. You can expect the same thing when Microsoft releases their next not-a-phone phone device. Microsoft needs to position their next device as the next big thing. Not the next extension of desktop features the average consumers don't use.
Yeah, I get what you are saying, but this isn't really unique to any operating system. Older folk tend to be creatures of habit. While certain store apps are mainstream popular, you are right that the store is underutilized.
Re: the live tiles, IDK if that's really important. iOS and Android both directly copy the desktop icon format. In windows you have several ways to do everything.
But the same problem exists on OSX, iOS and Android - when people introduce new features, habitful creatures either complain or ignore their existence.
You of course get people like you and me, who evolve (I use apps over browser every time, and have loads of UWPs on my PC), and then you get new users, who are more experimental and open - and they learn the new way of doing things. Over time, the old way dies, and the new way is the habit everyone is used to.
I don't really agree at all that MSFTs next device has to be 'the next big thing'. Most of the largest changes in mobile computing, such as AR, and folding devices are going to be in the sort of state the early cellphone was - expensive, and not entirely optimised for consumer use. While they most certainly well replace smartphones in their current form entirely, they are nowhere near ready for that.
For a folding phone, for example you need a creaseless display for consumer appeal, and a slim and study design. Graphene tech is at least a decade off being even affordable to enterprise. In the meantime, creases in the screen create serious obstacles to the FF - namely, optimal software uses will be dual screen multi-tasking, or apps with a split UI display. And the later doesn't exist at all as an ecosystem, on any platform.
For a folding screen you also need an adaptive OS - a hybrid OS. Something that scales to the screen size. That also doesn't exist right now, although MSFT is working on it, it's a project of the kind of size that it simply won't be polished and completed, this year, next year, or the year after, no matter how many coders they throw at it, or money.
Andromeda and HoloLens are more like alphas. More like the first cellphones. They are enterprise devices that will be used to lower manufacturing costs, streamline functionality, and work towards the slim FF, high function, polished version that consumers will eventually use.
Consumers expecting some tech revolution in mobile computing will be disappointed. It's not coming any time soon. And absolutely not at all for consumers in the near future. Nor will we get any massive changes in OS format any time soon. Windows core will be something that is "a bit different", and will gradually get more different.
Part of this is of course, exactly because of the resistance to change that you mention. The smartphone took off as quickly as it did, not because it was different, but precisely because it was entirely like a windows desktop. Consumers cope with change better when it's incremental.
But technologically speaking incremental is all we can reasonably expect too. Phones with optical zoom. Depth perception for AR (which nobody will really use, except for kids).
Instead, smart players like apple and msft have their eyes firmly on when it will, and are preparing for it. In about 10+ years time, that's when your "next big thing" will arrive. Probably a bunch of them at once, a fully fleshed out small form AR device "smartglasses", a properly folding creaseless device that slips into anyones pocket as has a robust OS and ecosystem to support its FF.
You see, the smartphone didn't come out of nowhere either. It was a very slow, incremental change that took place over decades. And it wasn't a consumer device to start with either. The next step isn't merely an evolution of the smartphone in terms of it being based entirely off existing technologies - the technologies for the next step have to be advanced in the way they were in the early days of cellphones, or the early days of computers.
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