If you look back to my first post in this thread, we have been waiting for Microsoft to come out with a decent OS since December of 2013, thinking it would coincide with the expiration of Windows XP on April 8. Never happened, and this morning on CNN news I read why:

"Microsoft is about to take the ax to one of the stupidest products it ever created.

CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday that Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) will combine all of its various Windows iterations into one unified version next year. That, thankfully, will mean the end of Windows RT, MIcrosoft's woefully executed and dreadfully received operating system.

Windows RT was supposed to usher in the tablet era for Microsoft. But Windows RT has two fatal flaws: it's missing crucial apps, and it's poorly designed. Unsurprisingly, the stripped-down operating system failed to take off. (Actually, that's an understatement: Microsoft took a $900 million writedown last year because of awful Surface RT sales, the only mainstream tablet than ran Windows RT.)

The biggest failure of Windows RT was that it took away the single best part of Windows -- the fact that it can run just about every app ever created.

Still, you can't run iTunes. There's no Chrome or Firefox browser. You likely can't run your company's custom-built software. Pretty much anything that requires a desktop is a no-go.

To recap: If you want to visit a website that the tablet version of the browser doesn't support, change a setting that you can't tweak in the normal settings app. Or, if you want to create a document, you have to exit the land of tiles and enter desktop world.

So, yeah, it's fair to say there are some design issues with Windows RT.

The concept of Windows RT was actually right: put Windows on any device, no matter what kind of processor or screen size it has -- even if the device is missing a keyboard and mouse. But Microsoft never made a compelling case for why you should buy a Windows RT tablet over a rival tablet except for the fact that it runs Office. And that argument just went out the window when Microsoft brought Office to the iPad earlier this year.

That's why Windows RT turned into one of the biggest flops in Microsoft's history. And that's saying a lot, considering Microsoft conjured up such duds as Windows Vista, Microsoft Bob and Clippy."