Thing is that users were very happy with the gradual changes brought on from Windows 95 all the way to 7 and for Microsoft to not continue this evolution like OSX has been gradually doing was madness, and insanity for the first time not giving the client the option to roll back one generation to get used to it. I've been using Windows since 3.0 and know you can fudge 8.1 to work like 7 with classic shell but why shouldn't that be baked into the OS in the first place as an option instead of a third party app? Why are the settings still FUBAR spread across classic and Metro?
Of course it would be better to let the user decide what to do, I wouldn't say that not doing that destroys the entire OS though.
Bottom line is - the market wants a good, stable, organised Microsoft desktop OS so that's why Windows 7 for XP migrations is so dominant because of the mess they've made with 8/8.1. You may like it but I'm afraid the market along with the vast majority of users including those with technological 'knowledge' are waiting to them to sort this mess out properly with 8.2/9.
What the market wants is not really interesting to me as most users are dumb, many users of the market make their decisions based on fancy advertisements and fanboyism. Market studies show that people have a tendency to be loyal towards brands based on no real objective information at all, they do not compare units to evaluate them on a unbiased level.
Yes, the market is what companies develop for, but it does not mean the markets interest can be used to evaluate if a product is good or bad.
I been using and evaluating everything for the past years and I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Currently I am back to a Mac laptop with a rMBP and also back to iPhone after a year of Windows Phone (which had problems with the lack of apps), my desktop is still running Windows though and so will my next tablet.
What does it have to do with logical thinking? Tablets and computers have different input, geometry and handling. Forcing the same UI on both is highly illogical. And as to 'desktop OS' - iOS and OS X are the same OS underneath, just with slightly different sets of libraries on top. They both are built from the same code.
It has to do with logical thinking that you have to actually look objectively at the product, not go "this is different, therefore bad" as many people do.
Yes I agree that forcing the same input on 2 different types of units with such different input capabilities is quite illogical, still doesn't make an entire OS bad.
I expect the product to work well for me without needing to tweak/hack the hell out of it. This reminds me of my experience with the original Samsung Galaxy S: 'once you download this custom firmware, root the phone, put the firmware on it and add this few custom config lines, it is a terrific phone!'. No matter how you put it, the Metro interface and WindowsRT is a big part of Windows 8. If you need to disable a major feature of an OS to make it 'good', well... its not really good, is it?
Well most major operating systems are the same. Take OS X with the retina displays, you can't even choose your resolution freely without installing third party programs.
As for Modern UI it is only something that I disable on my desktop, on a tablet or such it is working nicely. Disabling modern UI makes it like Windows 7 with improvements, so how could that make it worse than Windows 7? I see Windows 8 as an improved Windows 7 with a different GUI slapped on top.
If you don't realize that his points are as neutral as possible than I will fix up my own comment:
