>MS has possibly spend millions of dollars for marketing to be like the company with the rotten fruit, but usability. ROLF. The idiot who comes up with metro screen on a desc, single screend on a multi monitor, wasting space for something that looks like my mobile but 24 inches wide has wasted money. Simple look on different MS products, they are not consistent in itself. Try the OS where some settings are metro ugly, others are more or less like Win 7 while others are from the days of yore.
I'm not even going beyond W7 - the 8 and 10 are simply a no-go for me. Going for corners of the screen with a mouse, c'mon, that's unproductive.
Just look at what keeps happening with Skype since M$ bought it. From a fine little peer-to-peer app which just plain worked, it's become a complete mess. The transport protocol changes every couple of months. You can't hold a ten people meeting simply because at least one of them is on a version which is a bit older than the others. Then we cancel the meeting for five minutes to get the latest skype, and guess what, not everybody gets the same version. The buttons keep moving - I don't know how many times I've replied with the camera on because I clicked the wrong button. The voice only is sometime first, sometimes the second button. The show/hide chat button while on video is sometimes in the corner sometimes with the middle group. The button to take a shot is gone, now it's two clicks deep. The links pasted now actually get visited unless preceded with some text (so sending someone a one-time registration link will waste it). In multi-person chat, the names are interspersed with the text, while there are only icons to the left of the paragraph; there's about 120px of space to the left of the icon, so trying to see what was said five minutes ago will take more scrolling than before - and that's only after I've spent an hour learning how to compact the view; by default it actually shows only half of the text. There's also a bunch of little icons below the editbox which sometimes appear and sometimes not - with no rhyme or reason. I guess by the time the rules for that become intuitive, these will be gone as well and be replaced with something even more annoying.
The list of stuff from M$ that I'm still using has become very short: W7, VFP, SQL server (but not the horrible SSMS client!), cmd.exe and nothing else. And for the most of the W7's UI I'm running replacements - Launchy as the general MRU list of apps to launch or documents to open, TotalCommander as the file manager, viewer, FTP client and diff tool; bbLean as the shell and windows manager. In cases when I have to use the Windows desktop, with them icons, toolbar and the clumsy [strike]windows[/strike] file explorer, I feel like I'm wearing winter gloves, it feels so awkward.
