As a UX person I still give MS a fail on Windows 8. Yes it has a clean, aesthetic look. But it lacks usability. And any design that is not primarily focused on usability is best described as Kitsch. Even if it has all square angles.
That does not mean I think Apples god-awful "tape deck" interface or the horrors that are games center or find my friends are any good.
I am sick of designey people calling everything good that has a straight line. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design is how it works.
The Windows interface used to be clean and usable. Then they saw Mac OS X's Aqua and panicked, scrambled and came up with the turd that's XP, losing the "clean"; kept polishing that turd and came up with Aero in Vista, losing the "usable". It's a cautionary tale. With Metro Microsoft is at least getting the "clean" back, maybe the next iteration will bring back "usable". One can always hope.
Windows 8 is horrible. I am not going to fight you on that one as someone who's had plenty of trouble with it.
But it's not too much of a step back from Windows 7, so I find the more strict, general design philosophy to be a vast improvement; the gradients and Aero crap on Windows 7 and below was just so ugly to look at.
Windows's interface is horrible as always, and I don't envy people new to Windows who bought a Surface. Yikes.
Semi-off topic, but I find it interesting that Kim actually just took a job with Microsoft this week. I'd like to see what they are going to do with him.
His forté is in hardware, and he's been hired to work in the Xbox division, so I hope his touch will affect the look of the next Xbox console/controller and other peripheral products.
I really dislike what Microsoft did with the Xbox design in general, and a combination of Kim and the Metro aesthetic seems like the perfect antidote to that.
Microsoft design "theory" is "we can't beat Apple at their game, so let's run in the opposite direction because no one else is there, and pretend we think it's a good idea". It is like joining a contest to win "most beautiful house for miles around" and entering in the Sahara desert dsection
I am reminded of this definition of Microsoft's Metro aesthetic by Andrew Kim: http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5e....
~ http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...