Windows 8 was a “Dear John” letter to manufacturers like Acer and Dell, and CES 2013 was the official breakup. Now what?

The biggest news of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show – that enduring altar at which the industry lays bare its sacrifices for the coming year – was not Ultra-HD televisions, censored satellite receivers, or even smart vacuums. Rather, it was the void left by one of the shows biggest stars. Microsoft, the anchor of the PC ecosystem, which since 1995 had given every keynote presentation at the event that had come to represent the ying to Macworld’s yang, was a no show.

With Windows 8 just hitting its stride, it may seem like a funny time for Microsoft to drop off the CES map. But Microsoft knows what its OEM partners won’t admit: PCs are already dead, Windows 8 was never meant for them anyway, and the future lies in Microsoft-built hardware. Here’s what the future holds for the company that made its fortunes in a mine that’s running out of gold.

The withering PC

You’ve heard it bellowed from the rooftops of tech punditry for at least the past few years. “Mobile is going to kill the PC,” they said. “The cloud is going to kill the PC.” Well, they were right. This holiday season marked the first one in half a decade that PC sales slumped, even at the most deliriously spend-happy time of the year. In fact, a decline of 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter, as reported by researchers at IDC, was even more than the pessimistic 4.4 percent drop initially anticipated. Dell was hit so hard in 2012 that it’s likely the company will be taken private in the coming year. And Acer, the Taiwanese giant that just a few years ago christened a new wave of low-cost, high-quality computers at chains like Best Buy, saw nearly 30 percent of its U.S. sales disappear.

Windows 8 was supposed to staunch the bleeding. It’s a touch-friendly upgrade that is faster and prettier than the wildly successful Windows 7 it replaces. It can run on tablets, and desktops, and even convertible laptops — the calculator watches of the PC world! Sales, however, have not been quite as robust as expected; even after a $1.5 billion advertising blitzkrieg, Microsoft CFO Tami Reller announced that 60 million Windows 8 licenses had been sold since its October launch. Though Reller said those figures followed a “similar sales trajectory” to that of Windows 7, she failed to mention that Microsoft had to substantially discount the OS to match it. Windows 8 sold for as low as $40, while Windows 7 started at $150 and only went up from there.

Why the slump? Rafi Kronzon, co-founder and managing partner at Cartwheel, an IT consulting and support company based in New York City, put it to me bluntly: “If you are not using a tablet, there is absolutely no reason to install Windows 8. On a traditional computer, it’s unintuitive, clunky, and obtuse.”

How could Microsoft risk alienating its bread-and-butter users like that? Because Microsoft sees the same numbers you and I do.

It doesn’t matter if you have the entire PC market cornered if the entire PC market keeps shrinking, and it should be no surprise to anyone that Microsoft is hedging huge on mobile as the future of all personal computing. Apple is in a unique position; it offers a premium product and has room to grow its OS X user base. As such, it can afford to stave off the PC market contraction for the time being. Microsoft on the other hand, with its market saturation and heavy reliance on hardware partners, has no such luxury.

Windows 8 was never meant for the masses

When I asked a Microsoft spokeswoman how businesses were faring in Windows 8 adoption — given the radical interface changes and historical staidness of corporate IT departments — she gave an unusual reply. “One of the great things about Windows 8 is the compatibility with Windows 7, so businesses can feel good about adopting it side-by-side with Windows 7.”

Um, what?

That statement coincides perfectly with CFO Tami Reller’s own leaked talking points to ReadWriteWeb from earlier this week, stating that “Windows 7 continues to be incredibly popular in the commercial space, and we recommend enterprise customers in the process of deploying Windows 7 continue with those deployments. There is great compatibility between Windows 7 and Windows 8, and this will make it easier to start adopting Windows 8 side-by-side with Windows 7.”

A year ago, MS quietly updated its support cycle for Windows 7 to a full 10 years, which will bring the OS into the next decade.

Microsoft is ostensibly keeping Windows 7 around indefinitely for desktop use. At the same time, it’s now building a steady user base of consumer mobile users (although how steady is really anyone’s guess) for what it sees as its great bet on the future. Further, it’s optimizing its lucrative productivity software for a mobile interface on its own OS first. Keep in mind that the Microsoft Office Suite is actually the most profitable card in Redmond’s deck, accounting for almost $24 billion in revenue in 2012. By comparison, Windows brought in just over $18 billion in 2012, down from $19 billion in 2011.

The future will not be licensed

Microsoft’s PR-approved rationale for leaving CES was that “our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.” But really, there’s a much larger shift underway. Call it the “Appleization” of consumer technology, call it whatever you want: Microsoft’s following it. Redmond plans to have 44 retail stores open by June, 2013, and they won’t be pushing Dell desktops. The hardware will say Microsoft.

“Microsoft couldn’t remain static,” Bennett Kobb, a long-time industry analyst and a senior member of the IEEE, told me. “The company would be wrong not to embrace the tablet paradigm now that tablets are finally practical. And they would further be foolish to ignore certain Apple lessons, such as, control the hardware and the OS.”

Yes, there is a good reason Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer saved his one and only CES appearance for the otherwise tepid Qualcomm keynote: Partnerships with mobile-centric suppliers such as Qualcomm will ultimately be Microsoft’s salvation.

The Surface, which is by all accounts the best of the current Windows 8 bunch, is 100 percent Microsoft, and the opening salvo in what will be a torrent of Microsoft-designed hardware in the coming years. The company has already strayed from what was perhaps the most celebrated partnership in the history of the form — that with Intel — in favor of broader support for mobile ARM chips.

Microsoft’s official CES bow-out is the tech giant’s diplomatic uncoupling from the galaxy of OEM manufacturers it once groomed as if they were kin. It still needs OEMs while desktops are dominant and its hardware ducks aren’t quite in a row, but mark my words: Their days are numbered.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware,” the renowned computer scientist Alan Kay said. The world isn’t quite ready for Microsoft to fully realize that vision; look hard enough at Windows 8 though, and you just might see the future.

In a fun nod to the emerging geek community around 3D printing, Nokia has released the 3D specs for its Lumia 820 shell, allowing anyone with the right tools to create a 3D case for their phone.

3D Printing is beginning to take off and Nokia wants in. Whether or not you have a professional 3D printer, or a $1,500 do-it-yourself hackjob made of spare printer parts, Nokia is jumping onto the fabrication bandwagon and has offered up special 3D schematics that allow you to make cases for your Nokia Lumia 820.

In an online blog post, Nokia has says “[we] have become the first major phone company to begin embracing the 3D printing community and its incredible potential, and continue to be the leading phone company in this exciting field,” and gives hints that this is just the beginning for the merging between the Finnish phone manufacturer and the community of printers. This is great news for those who wish more companies would interact with their communities. While offering a 3D schematic for a case is nothing compared to more in-depth developer relations, it certainly is a good start for Nokia.

In reality, anyone can already make a case for their phone if they really wanted, but the process would be extremely difficult as you’d need to (probably through trial and error) make a case based on your own measurements, and not those from the manufacturer. While Nokia has only released a schematic for a basic (and perhaps not even cost efficient) phone case, it won’t be long until communities play with the design to make their very own cases with crazy things like E Ink displays built into them, crazy new colors and designs, or something even more amazing. Though we don’t yet have our own 3D printer, we hope this becomes a trend.

Samsung might not have been the first to produce a large screen phone, but they are surely the company who have managed to make the phablet a mainstream device.

The Galaxy Note 2 has been out for sometime now, and now with larger phones heading to the market such as the 6.1-inch Huawei Ascend Mate, it seems as though the Korean phone maker is working on a new whopper. According to sources close to Samsung a new 5.8-inch phone is in the works known internally as GT-I9512. Very little is known about the purported device but it is likely to run Jelly Bean in one form or another and could make use of Samsung’s new 8 core processors.

What do you think, would you like to see an even bigger Samsung handset than the Galaxy Note 2, or do you feel that the Note 2 is big enough as it is?

Last week we showed off a very primitive rendering of what the HTC M7 might look like, now we are back with a much more detailed render from HTCSource. If the render is the real deal, the HTC M7 will borrow quite a bit from the Windows Phone 8-based HTC 8X when it comes to its overall design.

Outside of the rendering, we also have seen “in the wild” pictures of the HTC M7, which match the above image’s overall design.

Besides a few blurry pictures of the HTC M7, what else do we really know? Not a whole lot, other than the assumption it will be a higher-end flagship device. The good news is that we also now have a screen-shot of the newest version of HTC Sense to go along with the HTC M7 shots.

For the moment, take all of this with a grain of salt. Luckily, we don’t have to wait too much longer before MWC and (hopefully) the official announcement of the HTC M7.