If you think MS is going to back down on touch, you're dead wrong. Moving forward, what the author refers to as "Metro" (actually known as the "Modern Interface") will be the default interface users interact with on WP and XBox. And yes, it might be true that they'll allow users to boot into the desktop, it's not confirmed that will be the default option for users.
The whole point of the Modern design language is to provide a unified experience for all of the Windows ecosystem. Honestly, it's really good - except on their most used product, Windows. I think when they allow Modern apps to run inside the desktop, allow desktop apps to work with the charms bar, and build their own laptop you'll see customers flock in droves to the Windows ecosystem.
Please don't call something "unified" when it shares none of the same code, doesn't work the same, and was created by teams who don't talk to each other. Superficially similar looking != unified.
The worst example of this was Visual Studio 2012. The UI was redone to superficially fit the Metro style. It became flat and monochrome and so visually undifferentiated that it was hard to navigate. And there were of course the obnoxious ALL CAPS menu labels.
The allcaps menus are genuinely baffling to me. I cannot even begin to comprehend that decision. It's not a different font or anything, it's just...all caps. Like some mid 90s teenager messing around with Visual Basic thought it looked cool.
Fortunately they didn't manage to really screw up Visual Studio in any significant way, and the dark interface skin looks great.
For the most part imo the flattening of the ui was an improvement. Puts the code in focus and minimizes everything else. They did go a little bit too far I think especially with the icon set but overall I've found it to be cleaner and easier to focus on the code. Hopefully they'll back off a little from extreme flatness and find a better balance in a future release.
Seems to me the whole win8 ui fiasco is something Microsoft does a lot.. Have a good idea, go way overboard with it, and end up having to pull back and find a more refined middle ground in a future release. If only they'd find a way to internalize this process instead of making us all into a usability study...
Because it's infinitely more complicated. One context menu can end up bigger than your screen [1] and that doesn't count the number of different debug windows hanging off the debug menu [2], there's a bunch of menus for testing, editing etc most of which are not right in front of me.
I'm pretty handy with VS but given its sheer size I don't need any extra impediments. RANDOM ALL CAPS MAKES THIS SENTENCE DISTRACTING. I HAVE TO LOOK AT MENUS A LOT.
Contrast with the Outlook ribbon's "Home" tab which puts 95% of what I need to do right there always visible by default. I don't have to hunt around at the top of my SCREEN WHICH IS IN DISTRACTING ALL CAPS nearly as much.
The first thing I do after installing VS2012/VS2013 is to edit the registry to return the correct casing to the top level menus.
The icon scheme for SSDT in VS2012 was the worst. No colour, just symbols. Want to add a primary key? Look for the key icon. Sounds good in practice but there's lots of monochromatic key symbols overlaid onto other monochromatic symbols (primary key on table, symmetric key, foreign key). At least with the colour I can more easily distinguish the primary key is gold and the blue square it's in front of is a table.
FWIW I don't think I was significantly less productive in VS2012 than 2010 but it's a moot point now since VS2013 put colour back in.
Office 2013 is also idiotic, and arguably worse than VS when it comes to caps. In Office 2013, "random" elements are capitalized, with no rhyme or reason. It doesn't mean they're clickable. It doesn't mean they're action items or titles. There's no sense I can find.
The fact that the betas had wildly different casing seems to point to some designers holding the product to their whims, instead of based on any sort of intelligent thought.
What's weird about this thread is that the "Modern design language" is considered to be unifying. A design language is just a theme. A skin. It's not meant to unify. Wide lapels this year. Narrow lapels next year.
APIs are unifying. Too bad they are un-unified in Windows. A security model is unifying. But <sad-tombone/> not in Windows.
So WP and XBOX will be the touch vanguard? Damn but that TV is far away. Makes touch laptop look reasonable.
A good design language is certainly more than just a theme. An arrow is a visual design to indicate direction. It's almost universally recognized. It's a sign. Just like a word.
If iconography can be seen as a form of barebones language, what else can we fit in the concept? Perhaps colour? Red for STOP, or urgency. Green for go. If shapes and colours, why not relative sizes? Big for important things, small for detailed things.
These are the kinds of concerns that pertain to the construction of design languages. You can see how they can be unifying.
No one expects Microsoft to retrench from touch, nor does anyone misunderstand what they were trying to do: They wanted to leverage their desktop dominance into some mobile/tablet marketshare. Many words can be spilled justifying this (unifying being one), but the stark reality is that it degraded the experience on the mouse and keyboard desktop, where the design simply followed the desire to get into what Apple was having success at.
And ofc Apple, in turn, spent much of its 30-years-of-Macintosh celebration making indirect slams on the Metroisation of Windows and the whole desktop/touch-unification idea http://www.macworld.com/article/2090829/apple-executives-on-... "You don’t want to say the Mac became less good at being a Mac because someone tried to turn it into iOS." etc.
The whole point of the Modern design language is to provide a unified experience for all of the Windows ecosystem. Honestly, it's really good - except on their most used product, Windows. I think when they allow Modern apps to run inside the desktop, allow desktop apps to work with the charms bar, and build their own laptop you'll see customers flock in droves to the Windows ecosystem.