Microsoft is making a huge push today to promote the new Windows 8 operating system along with the Surface tablet. It’s a huge bet for Microsoft, as the try to take on Apple directly and get into the game in the tablet market, while still retaining its stranglehold on the corporate PC market.

We’ll see what happens. Radical upgrades often don’t work well for Microsoft. Remember Vista? I do. It was a complete disaster. Then Microsoft righted the ship with Windows 7, where execution was more important than bells and whistles. So we’ll see how consumers react, and then we’ll see how businesspeople react. The tablet revolution does have the potential to shake things up a bit in the workplace.

Still, we’ve reached a point where the changes affect how we use computing services and devices, but does it change other areas of business much? So much has already changed in the past 30 years that there might be areas immune to advances in the devices we use. Businesses still use brochures for some types of promotion despite PowerPoint, though they might use online printing and ordering brochures at UPrinting in order to save money. Even at the Microsoft event, you can be sure they have printed posters and displays to go along with the big tech screens.

We just seem to have reached a point where these upgrades make a big difference in some areas, but others just stay the same.

Here’s an awesome ad from Apple’s old campaign comparing the Mac to the lame PCs of the era. This version with Gisele Bündchen really drove the point home that Macs were better in so many ways.

The question now is whether Microsoft can finally fight back. It will be releasing the new operating system along with new office software. Will it be a huge step forward as some are saying, or will it suck like Vista with Microsoft blowing the execution? In reaction to the new Surface tablet, Steve Wosniak made the stunning statement that it was as if Steve Jobs had been reincarnated at Microsoft.

We’ll see this fall . . . .