Errr... that's a tad backwards I think. Home users have no relevance to the enterprise; to the contrary, they are historically driven BY the enterprise. You may have omitted the decade+ time where there WERE no "home users". We did not adopt PCs because "Sally the Secretary" had one at home.
Windows made it into the enterprise simply because of legacy DOS applications. DOS was somewhat simple to write software on. And the PC was somewhat simple to build hardware for.
Contrast that with a Mac. To write a business app required everything you'd do on a PC, and then... 300 hours f*ing with font colors. For an accounting package. Or inventory. Or... yeah, I'll take my DBase or Foxbase in DOS, please. Spend six hours of your life f*ing around with making an 80column print job line up. Now we get to repeat that on screen? And it really did come down to that. There was no OO, everything was top-down, and mice were for pussies.
Windows, more than a GUI, was an API to make it cheaper to write software.
"Visual Basic", all that junk was an effort to make it cheaper to write software.
Because in the beginning, there wasn't any. *Everything* was vertical. Even .jpeg decoding had to be written, yourself.
The strategy was a cornerstone of the "Application Barrier to Entry". If you don't know that phrase, you are missing the basis of MS anti-trust. .NET is just a continued tactic for chasing the 1000 Monkey Coding Model, which makes it cheaper to write software... put 10,000 monkeys on a keyboard and you'll get Hamlet? Put 1,000 monkeys in VS.NET and you'll get working code. THAT is today's strategy behind how MS stays in the enterprise.
Some home users picked up PCs at home due to familiarity, but most home buys were for "that's where the software is", and also "jackass website requires IE". Or "AOL sux on mac". Or, "game requires PC". There weren't too many copies of Wolf3d running on a Mac as I recall. And OS2 was stillborn.
It is funny how such things evolve. Windows is entrenched in SKorea due to an e-commerce law; when SSL was new, the SK Govt passed a law requiring a specific form of encryption be used for all e-commerce traffic. The only accepted implementation ever made was an ActiveX control. Can you guess why ActiveX was the chosen tactic? It was cheapest to develop that way. Cheap!! The very reason the ActiveX model was invented, and exposed to the browser. And Excel. And Word. And Outlook. And any other application that cared to use it. Hopefully one of our SK readers will chime in with how that situation has evolved over time, since then. But it all started with cost to develop; users were never even considered. Every website out there had to push that control, and every user wanting online commerce had to run IE. Period. The enterprise drove home buys there, for sure.
You do hit the nail on the head later on regarding any-device stuff. Windows 8 is just the continuation of the 1000 monkey model, and it is likely a response to Oracle. With targets of desktop, mobile, and server... you get to pick what you'll develop in, and that dictates your cost. You can use Java, and have one codebase, one skillset, and one dev team handle it all. You can go Apple, and have a codebase for IOS, another for MacOS, another for your (linux?) server that has nothing to do with the other two, and... yeah, skillset requirements all over, and probably 3 teams that need to talk really well, and a project manager from hell. Or, you can do it with one team using .NET, single project, same skillset, and even the same GUI concept between desktop, mobile, and server-side widget crap.
If you consider some fictitious company the scope of Fedex, rolling a from-scratch solution for every form-factor that they CAN use in the office, warehouse, loading bay, airplane, truck, and wrist - your options are Oracle... or .NET. Those really are the two choices that don't implicitly involve separate trainwrecked codebase, skillsets, and teams. And with Win8... the salespoint is obvious: potentially the lowest skillset needed over the entire lifecycle, and everything now has a standard GUI, kind of like how Google just made Android have at least one standard theme. From that perspective, you can see how Win8's horrible UI was kind of required to happen. Presuming that MSFT is shooting to keep .NET the best value for "write once run anywhere... if it supports .NET".
Will it matter? I cannot say. Up til the past few years, the enterprise drove the PC market. When you heard about the Saudi Aramco hack a few months back, did you catch the fact that they have 40,000 PCs in their production? Legacy today, certainly. But *how did they get there*. It wasn't home users. Those desktops were dictated by the vertical stack, and that was dictated by cost to create. One decision, resulting in purchase of 40,000 machines. In just one single shop. Next, repeat for National Grid. ConEd. PacBell. Verizon. These days, the enterprise probably doesn't drive the PC market anymore. But that just threatens the enterprise devs with higher costs to deal with fragmentation. And that's why MSFT force-fed that stupid Win8 GUI.
Cheers,
