The company's new UK managing director, Michel van der Bel, is honest about the challenges: "Everything is moving to mobile," he says. "There's been a lot of discussion about whether the PC market has gone, and everything is defaulting to tablet.
We feel that the PC market is very much alive but clearly in a pretty big transition." Transition is one way of describing a 20 per cent year-on-year decline in PC sales.
But in an approach that is, depending on your viewpoint, either perverse or a necessary evil, Microsoft is itself hastening that transition. With the Windows 8 launch six months ago, it added a whole interface built for tablets to the familiar Windows desktop; it was a move that Apple's CEO mocked as akin to building a combined fridge and toaster.
And in an act likened by analysts to self-immolation, Microsoft ditched the Start button. It's impossible to find anyone that was asking for this. Now the company is under mounting pressure to bring it back as part of an update codenamed Windows Blue that is likely to be released with a name harking back to the glory days: Windows 8.1.
So will it? "Potentially," says Van der Bel. But he adds, "I'm actually a little bit surprised about all this discussion over the Start button. When it was there, people were like 'Oh, you have to go to the Start button to shut down your PC.' There was always a kind of controversy about these things [but] it's been taken out of context." Microsoft blames much of the "hyperbole" about the issue on an excitable media.
And, indeed, that's reasonable: businesses – always the key targets for a major new operating system because some will ultimately buy hundreds of thousands of licenses for the software – have not focused on the Start button.
As Van der Bel says, "If you want to roll out Windows 8 you need to do something pretty different on training." However, he adds, "And we're helping that. This has been a huge change. You have to learn it."
It's not all bad for Microsoft: 100 million licenses for Windows 8 have already been sold, and 250 million apps have been dowloaded from its still novel store. Even in the face of relative success, however, Van der Bel observes the company cannot win.
"I'm not sure I call [the changes] a concession," he says. "If you don't listen to feedback, you're arrogant, and if you do, it's a concession. It's not about concession, it's about doing things you should do in response to feedback. We're not going back to the Windows 7 world."
Part of Microsoft's transition has been its remarkable shift to a company that makes its own hardware, and today it announces UK availability of a combined tablet and laptop called Surface Pro.
For the first time it offers complete Windows functions in a device that aims to be conspicuously cool yet made by Microsoft itself. Van der Bel claims it is "not an occasional device – it is a device where, for instance, you can really shift through a lot of email, but have entertainment and movies as well". Implicitly, it's much more than the iPad, he says.
Bill Gates recently said he thought many of those users were "frustrated" that they couldn't do everything they wanted. Van der Bel says he detects "a lot of appetite" for devices that offer the best of all possible worlds.
The Windows Blue update will come in June, with or without that totemic symbol. Many commentators maintain that the current version of the software went too far and too fast, gambling that consumers would seize a new way of working that was both new and familiar.
It remains to be seen whether, as chief executive Steve Ballmer put it, "betting the company" will pay off. But for many, Microsoft hit the Start button to close down its own era of unparalled success.
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