It’s hard to believe that the loss of goodwill is worth whatever revenue Microsoft’s gaining from this, so I have to assume this is them dipping their toe into a strategy that attempts to make them more relevant to users. Maybe a reaction to the Windows app store’s lack of success? Thoughts?
To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now one of the major general-computing OSs is heading in the same direction.