I loved the ideas of these kinds of products and always hated the metaphor when using them. They were valuable when the general public was trying to understand

I loved the ideas of these kinds of products and always hated the metaphor when using them. They were valuable when the general public was trying to understand what the hell all that computer stuff was, but really they got in the way. It reminds me of those old "mall" or "map" efforts to get people online (eWorld, the Playstation online environment, even, at an extreme, Second Life). The fact is nobody wants to "walk" from shop to shop; they want to be in gap and then be in See's candies. On the web you can click from one to the other; in real life you can't so you walk. Trying to reproduce these meatspace metaphors merely unnecessarily implements meatspace limitations. Even now I prefer to use the command line on my mac because the friction of dragging the mouse around for routine action is annoying...but getting better. Apple got this right with the iphone. They started out with metaphors that reflected experiences skeuomorphically to teach you how to use the touch interface (e.g. scrolling "wheels" to select numbers) then phased them out relatively quickly as everybody internalized them.* Failure to comprehend this is one of the many issues killing VR. They need to exploit the new affordances of the new technology, with a small number of onramps. * Whether they continued this phase out for too long is another question