The usability regressions and stupid gimmicks in Windows 7 (and Vista) vs. XP reveal that Microsoft has lost its way (or possibly its talented designers) since it advanced the state of the art in the '90s. And that goes for its development tools too. Visual Studio was without peer, but now suffers from the same ridiculous defects it did 15 years ago and a whole bunch of new ones. We're talking about glaring design flaws that were inexcusable in Visual C++ version 1.5, let alone Visual Studio 2010.
Now MS is going to try to spew out another vague all-encompassing platform? If it seemed that this was going to be a lean, mean new UI description language on top of a new, modern OS... well, that'd be great. But there's no way that's what this is going to be.
Microsoft needs to pare down and do something right (modern and lean) from the ground up, or simply give it up.
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