Paul Thurrott is a long time tech journalist with a strong focus on Microsoft & Windows. With the Microsoft event Tuesday, the 6th, he's briefly summarized what's at stake for Microsoft, with short articles on petri.com & his own site [tabbed at pertri.com]. It's time to face it -- when it comes to the devices that individual people use [like you & me], Windows is now a niche OS, that if Microsoft plays its cards right, will hold onto some relevance in 3rd place, behind Android & iOS.
The stage was set, the cards were dealt or however you want to put it, at the very beginning when the 1st PCs were sold -- they were & have been very much generalized devices intended to do whatever you wanted, as long as you used the right software. For many tasks they were & are overkill. Then Apple released the iPhone, showing the world that you no longer had to have a PC with all its overhead, when all you wanted [or needed] to do was something relatively simple.
Sure, if Apple hadn't done it some other company would have, but fact is they did, so Blame Apple. ;)
That's not to say PCs are dead or dying or going anywhere anytime soon. For heavy duty processing you need a heavy duty CPU, which currently means heavy duty cooling that simply won't fit into a small case or housing. As it is Microsoft's new Surface tablets & top of the line cell phones make use of liquid cooling. For real typing you need a real keyboard, & then there's the display -- no matter how high the pixel density of the screen you're looking at, there's something to be said for a 24"-27" monitor.
That said, when you count which screen people are looking at for the most hours per day, & when you count hardware sales, PCs are far and away in last place. If you're a software company, & owe your existence to the people looking at, using your product(s), that's what matters. That's what's driving so many software developers to iOS & Android, just as that's been what's driving so much of Microsoft's strategy. That is not saying that Microsoft has always done well -- has always designed the best strategy, or implemented it as they maybe should. It is saying that your PC is no longer so much at the center of their universe.
Microsoft has been making very sure that their other software & services are on both Apple & Android hardware. They've been very heavily investing themselves in the cloud -- regardless how business might or might not use the cloud in the future, cell phones don't have much storage, have limited processing power, & using more of what power they do have drains batteries. And if you use a PC at home &/or work, having your stuff in the cloud means working on &/or using it anywhere, on any device.
For those less inclined to use cloud services, Microsoft's strategy seems to be docks for their cell phones, letting you carry your PC in your pocket, then using it with a monitor, keyboard etc. at your desk. That ties in with their Continuum, giving you a Windows desktop on a device with a screen that's too small for a desktop.
It seems no one's completely sure where tablets fit into all of this. Sales are declining -- some speculate people will from now on buy tablets similar to how they buy PCs, unlike still skyrocketing cell phone sales. You might see this confusion materialized in Google's new Pixel C -- essentially a chromebook running [the more limited] Android instead.
However it all settles out in the future, or when it doesn't seem like there are that many new Windows apps nowadays, or so-called casual games, if it might make you feel any better, Blame Apple.