btarunr The best competition for Windows is pirated Windows. The worry that its revenues will dry up, and that a large chunk of the userbase isn't paying for your product, is what forces innovation in the Windows ecosystem.

Nope. Android is.The fact that Android hasn't yet come to desktop (I was expecting Nvidia to be the driving force behind that, but I guess they don't want to jeopardize GTX sales), doesn't mean that it is not a big threat to Microsoft. Because Android today is the only OS that enjoys Windows's BIGGEST advantage. What advantage? Well, not it's features or it's innovation. Many will laugh at that phrase to be honest. The biggest advantage of Windows is that people are used to it, and Android is a threat to Windows, because people are also used to it. People use it every day, probably there are people who use it more hours daily than Windows. Also it doesn't have the biggest disadvantage of Linux with it's gazillion of distributions. You have only one Android, backed up by a big corporation that doesn't let 5000000 people with 5000000 great ideas to mess up with it and create something that it can not be supported easily from hardware manufacturers.Microsoft knows that Android is a threat. That's why they tried to respond with Windows 8 and Metro UI. But Balmer got it the other way arround. He rushed accepting defeat for the desktop, instead of doing the opposite. Upgrading the desktop and trying to bring Windows experience on smartphones and tablets. That's what Microsoft is doing now.Thankfully for them, Google tries to push ChromeOS to desktop to sell online services and that gave them time. But if we see Android moving to desktop, things will turn ugly for Microsoft. Have you tried using Android with a keyboard and mouse? Extremely easy. Add to that Vulkan and things could turn ugly for Microsoft in the near future.