>It’s almost like there’s a hidden agenda somewhere. It's not so much as a hidden agenda as sacrificing their primary product to be advertising for a different

>It’s almost like there’s a hidden agenda somewhere. It's not so much as a hidden agenda as sacrificing their primary product to be advertising for a different product and concept that consumers soundly rejected, and Microsoft's been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Ads and telemetry were just things that their new features supported, but weren't the driving force behind those features. Wind the clock back to 2011. Desktop and laptop PC sales are declining and tablets are the new consumer hit. People are buying iPads (and to a lesser extent Android tablets) at an alarming rate, and this might be the end of a reliable revenue stream for Microsoft if people are replacing their old desktops and laptops with said iPads. So, Microsoft comes up with the vision that their products will do more than an iPad can. Instead of having a standalone tablet as the home's primary computer, you'll buy a Microsoft tablet- which will not only be Just As Good as the iPad, but it'll also function as your main computer when you need it to. They even went so far as to create their own brand of tablet, but the extra hardware that needed to be provided for Windows to run smoothly (and the keyboard) meant that it would cost twice as much as the iPad (there was a neutered version that was comparable, but had no applications and outside of Office wasn't a suitable desktop replacement). But there's another problem. Windows isn't a good tablet OS- the interface has been designed for a mouse and keyboard. So they come up with Metro and the brand new WinRT API with which to create applications, and spend a lot of time getting it ready. Of course, since the entire vision of the future is "one Windows for everything", it made perfect sense for any system running this new version of Windows to use Metro. After all, they had just spent millions of dollars developing it and didn't want it to turn into another dead product. So they made the fateful decision to deprecate the (already very much existing) desktop UI support in favor of Metro. It didn't matter that the interface was wholly unacceptable for desktop use, though it was Good Enough for the majority of the userbase- because people would be using Windows tablets and touchscreens in the near future anyway, in addition to their new Windows Phones (which would get quick application support because WinRT was a cross-platform solution). That didn't turn out so well (Windows Phone is no more, UWP won't see further support as far as exclusive features go, and the only noteworthy Windows convertible tablet remains the Surface Pro) but it took a few years for that to become apparent- cue Windows 8.1 and later Windows 10 (the return of the Start Menu being a token gesture, since it lacked most of the functionality of the old Menu out of the box). There have been no major UI redesigns since, and everyone there's probably just trying to pick up the pieces until the next version arrives, if it indeed ever does.