Michael Mulvey points out an interesting distinction between Microsoft and Apple in Very Soft, his response to the news of Microsoft’s first ever quarterly loss:

The thing is, Microsoft has never been a consumer-focused company to begin with. Windows was designed for businesses, not people. Microsoft got in good early in the enterprise market in the 80’s and 90’s and that trickled down to peoples’ home computers. “I have Windows at the office, I might as well get it for home.” That left Apple out in the cold until Steve Jobs came back in 1998.

Contrast that with:

Windows PC spread from the office to the home. In the past 10 years we’ve seen the opposite: Apple products are going from the home to the office.

This is true. As BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies become more prevalent, corporate IT departments are finding that many of those devices are iPhones and iPads, and they just have to find a way to deal with that. It goes even further, because these devices are “gateway drugs” that end in employees dumping Windows PCs in favor of Macs (see How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple Fanboy for a good example). And before you know it you have a groundswell revolt against Microsoft Office for Mac, and a loud push to switch everything to iWork and Google Docs.

It’s a difficult situation for Microsoft, because the shift is mostly driven by masses of individual contributors — not executives. And it’s a situation that Windows 8 is not guaranteed to fix.