I wouldn't say the desktop experience was 'compromised'. 'Depreciated' (i.e. made legacy) or 'encapsulated' would be the description I'd use. Consider how the

I wouldn't say the desktop experience was 'compromised'. 'Depreciated' (i.e. made legacy) or 'encapsulated' would be the description I'd use. Consider how the transition from command-line interfaces to GUI was made. Even today you can open up the Command Prompt in Windows (or Terminal in OSX) and run legacy MS Dos apps. Well Balmer saw Jobs heralding the iPad as the future of computing, the launch lines, and the early spectacular growth and he freaked out. So, following the old interface transition playbook, Win8 was designed as a touch-first UI and then the desktop UI was squirreled away as an app (and the command prompt inside that desktop app ― inception). Win8 was an excellent tablet/touch designed OS and also purists could configure Win8 to bypass the touch stuff and skip straight to the desktop at launch... however Balmer had made a bad bet. In the broader picture, the future of computers hasn't turned out to be touch tablets. The iPad peaked and the traditional laptop formfactor is still going strong. So Balmer's bet on a touch first Windows wasn't worth it. Moreover the execution was lacking. While Win8 was an excellently designed touch/tablet OS, it was not fully implemented so there were many leaky abstractions back to the desktop interface. Most notably there were many settings that could not be configured in the touch/tablet interface ― the system would randomly throw the user into the desktop app ― and all the Microsoft Office apps (except One Note) could only be used in the desktop interface. There was no way to completely disable the desktop app and hand over a Win8 tablet that worked exactly as an iPad. Win10 went back to the drawing board and presents touch and desktop UI as complementary options side-by-side instead of a touch-first UI. That unfortunately meant removing some of the system wide Win8 touch designs that didn't quite work well with mouse+keyboard.