Oh come off it. Name me an established software company that hasn't forced choices on their desktop users that many of them have considered "terrible". Over a similar timescale Apple has been responsible for the debacle that was Apple Maps (to reduce dependence on Google) and the dubious aesthetics of iOS7 whilst Google and Yahoo have forced millions of users to choose other services as they go on shutdown rampages (to focus on more profitable areas) and in Yahoo's case, touted the availability of your old Yahoo email addresses to phishers (because they're crazy?). Meanwhile, despite your "refuse to backtrack" claim Microsoft has brought the much-missed Start button back in the first major patch and continues to ship Windows 7 - you can even downgrade your 8 license if you miss it too much. You can't do that with iOS7 which despite being a relatively conservative update had equally mixed reviews...
Criticising Microsoft is like shooting fish in a barrel, so it's odd you'd pick on them for innovating without thought to convention and backward compatibility - an area where they're generally more cautious than the peers you named - and a product that actually has plenty of fans.
Also, what kind of drugs does one need to ingest to make it seem like a good idea to enforce UI conventions optimized for 4" cell phones on a user with a pair of 30" desktop monitors? Are we talking plant-based alkaloids, aromatic hydrocarbons, or what?
I guess it's a person to person thing. I am still on win7 and i usually have a lot of windows open, and i rarely ever browse through the start menu. What i usually do is press the windows button, and start typing the name of the program i wanna use. OR I press win+D to get straight to the desktop (a full screen menu consisting of things i frequently use) and choose from there.
So for someone like me, isn't the Metro Start menu good design? It has both the type-to-search thing and a full screen menu of icons i usually use.
Look i admit it seemed a little intimidating when i first saw it. Heck we have been using the start menu for more than a decade! It's almost part of our DNA now, so seeing the entire screen change in place of a menu is.... unexpected. But is it really that bad? Do you REALLY still browse through the start menu?
No, I live at the Windows command prompt, pretty much. But like you said, I'm a different user type.
The difference between me and the people at Microsoft is that I understand that there are different user types. None of which asked for their desktop PC to behave more like their cell phone.
Criticising Microsoft is like shooting fish in a barrel, so it's odd you'd pick on them for innovating without thought to convention and backward compatibility - an area where they're generally more cautious than the peers you named - and a product that actually has plenty of fans.