I think you're right. But the consequence of that is, of course, that the touch driven "immersive" part is only going to be skin deep. Which in turn means that Windows 8 is going to fail spectacularly on tablets, for the exact same reasons every previous Windows tablet failed.

MSFT has to realise that eventually for the good of the company they WILL have to do something to cut part of their love-child windows out of something. They are unwilling to sacrifice Windows, even a small part of it, for the greater good. That is why MSFT will once again release a product that is not fit for tablet PC's.

consumer != corporate

The gap between consumer and corporate is getting smaller every day. This trend is only going to continue, so betting on something appealing only to enterprise, not consumers, is a self-defeating strategy.

Enterprise will always be different than the consumer market until the nature of the enterprise decentralizes.

The key driving distinction between enterprise and consumer is that in the enterprise the person using the software had almost no say in its purchase and thus has almost no say in its development. Consumer software works well when you use it, enterprise software looks good when you see it in a powerpoint presentation next to a feature checkbox, or hear about it on a golf course. Since no one making the purchasing decision will ever actually use it, you're pretty much guaranteed sales. Especially if you can pair it with expensive training that is necessary because your software is designed so poorly.

Having features is generally how you get through an RFP the purpose of an RFP is to CYA. Thus if you have the RFP approved by management and the proposal meets the RFP you're guaranteed a sale if no one else can check the boxes. If you ever get approved for an RFP you should immediately apply to become the vendor of record / preferred vendor for everything in that space guaranteeing more sales of your atrocious software.

Never design software that works in the enterprise as you'll lose out on massive support / training revenue. The worse your software is the better it will sell. Hopefully you can figure out how to sell software that doesn't actually do ANYTHING until they hire programmers to customize it. (I'm looking at you CRM vendors)

Once you've been through a couple of these things you'll understand how it works and how crappy software is incentivized by the RFP system.

You should also have an RFP template ready that contains all the features your software has so that lazy employees from megacorp can submit it for approval. Your sales people should be all too ready to help the employee out with this task so that they have a very professional and tailored RFP. Now that they don't have anything to do that day you should take them out for a beer to celebrate how fast they submitted the RFP to management. Management will remember them as the guy who gets stuff done so quickly and professionally, they'll move up quickly.

Pardon my french, but this a shallow phrase. Typically enterprise UIs has dozens of input controls, not because the Developers suck but because they need a lot more input than the google search page, a media player or something like that. Touch Interfaces will always suck in those cases, and HTML5 is still far away from handling those beasts in an elegant way.

I would argue that the gap is getting bigger.

Tablets, no-desktop households, webapps: all of these are key consumer devices. Speed, flexibility are key

Enterprises are stuck on the desktop workstations with local apps. Managability of the apps by IT is key.

what I actually meant with my perhaps too self-satisfied pithy post was that whether or not an immersive Office is ready or will be ready for Win8 release, I'm sure they will have a suite of consumer-oriented apps similar to the built in WP7/smart phone apps (or Windows Live Essentials): music, photos, maps, search, social networking, messaging, games. They'll probably fund internal and external development of other key apps as well, again like WP7.

But all corporate employees are also consumers, and the last ten or so years of consumer-oriented web and native application development has raised everyone's expectations about how software can look and behave. The corporate IT shops are not immune from the demands that these expectations create.

For example, a significant proportion of them are now having to work out how to support Apple's devices for corporate network access, email, document sharing and delivering apps for internal users and consumers, and all because corporate executives are also consumers.

Don't underestimate this. Over the last five years I worked in corporate IT I heard more and more request for "iPhone" versions of our apps and saw more and more emphasis put on making things look good, with Apple's design aesthetic defining "good". Microsoft ignores this growing tide at its peril.

I think Windows 8 powered tablets are going to suck just as much for corporate as for consumers.