PC was never going to die, computers are used for everything in the 21st century, not just for gaming, so if you think this is a "leap for survival" then you're wrong. Survival is never in question.
I'm not exactly in either camps presented here, except that the entire point of the PC was that it was largely an open format, that was customisable - a hackers playground that lead to many games, software and hardware that we use today. Now, as Microsoft has been closing down harder than before in recent years, in particular as they tried to on the new Xbox, but were forced to retract in some areas, I think the traditional concept of the PC is indeed dying. And it seems like a rather arbitrary decision according to this quote: "Microsoft will support the list of Skylake PCs running Windows 7 and 8.1 for only 18 months, until July 2017". That's not a hardware limitation if you can just turn on or off compatibility whenever you want. That's just a choice which only grants the monopolistic corporations more control.
Now I guess it's quite unclear what "support" means. If they mean you can choose to run another operating system but there is just no official support or technical help, then that's not as bad. If they literally mean it's cut off completely then that's very bad of them.
I've been mulling over for a while the possibility of moving over to Linux or some other OS, rather than 'upgrade', because I don't like at all the direction MS is going, and it's shitty that the only two real competitor OSes are converging in their lack of user freedom. Windows 10 backwards compatibility has been god awful so far and makes a lot of games unplayable, which is completely unacceptable and one of the terrible aspects of the consoles. Of course switching OS would also do that, so it's really a catch-22, and that's the danger of only having a two major competitors. Feels like the corridor is narrowing rapidly.
Last year, AAA titles for PC were abysmal. From Arkham Knight, Assassin's Creed, and even to Black Ops 3, it's easy to see that the great game of compatibility balancing is destroying the PC gaming market.
But they're not even the PC market... they're console games being terribly ported. In fact what's incredibly ironic is that with the arrival of PS4 and Xbox everyone said PC ports would be better, because the architecture is not very different anymore. And what happened? Some of the worst ports in history from some of the biggest games companies in history. They fully knew their games were terrible and released them anyway.
It's a decision will balance the grounds between PC and consoles. We're already clearly in the lead in the great game, but this change in design will send consoles leagues into a sea of obsolete despair. It's not just about gaming, but it might very well be the biggest advantage of this.
How does closing down the system make it better than console? The whole problem with consoles are the fact they're completely closed, with ridiculous attempts at DRM and a limited selection of games and hardware vendors. This is anywhere from your console having to check in online every 24 hours, to not being able to lend a game to a friend anymore, to lack of backwards compatibiliy which renders the entire previous generation useless, to only a limited selection of software/games because every publisher has to get a license from Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo, to no games modding, no hardware modding, no unofficial patching, etc etc. If you think Microsoft won't go further down that road as PC options get increasingly limited, I think you're wrong.
