They are damned either way, but that's a situation they put themselves in and it was one which anyone with half a clue could see coming from the moment we first got our hands on the preview. What an excellent tablet interface, most of us thought! Now, where's the off switch? :-)
I agree, Win8 is probably a trivial factor in the falling sales. So many people simply never needed or wanted a PC, they just had one because there was no alternative. My mother only ever uses an iPad now, and I believe a lot of younger people only ever use phones. So there's good reason for MS to be looking to the future and experimenting. But not with my poxy desktop please. :-)it's incredibly difficult to see how well it's doing in the face of a whole heap of other factors affecting PC sales too (which, after all is where the sales come from).