I really don’t see this as a move towards trying to become a ‘retro Google'... Looking at where MSFT is heading with a unified design across all its products an

I really don’t see this as a move towards trying to become a ‘retro Google'... Looking at where MSFT is heading with a unified design across all its products and properties, it looks to me like a natural evolution of the page becoming more ‘Metro’ (simple, clean, intuitive). And there are really only so many ways to display text/links in a 'minimalistic' fashion while keeping the basic functionality people expect... I’d guess though that this is a first in a series of small, gradual, changes to the site geared toward 'metrofying' it. I bet we’ll soon see Segoe replace Arial as the predominant font next.