You are right, Looking good and actually being usable are quite different. The main problem with this concept, I think, was that the extreme minimalism ended u

You are right, Looking good and actually being usable are quite different. The main problem with this concept, I think, was that the extreme minimalism ended up in a UI that hides too much information. Even when I love the way it looks like, it feels like I would need to hover everything, just to get more info (and if Win8 aims to touch devices... hover is not good). And of course, it doesn't look good for multitasking. Here are some other concept designs from the same time... http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/2823647/windows-8-desktop-ui-concepts http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/2823647/windows-8-desktop-... This other example is really interesting, because of the fact that it anticipated extremely well how Windows 8's Explorer looks like today: http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/8/b/8b357c7cff026daa20807ea9e1130ed5-d4qw8bx.jpg http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/8/b/8b357c7cff026... http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/0/b/0bd5349ab72b1e7a6efbf476c7db0cf0-d4qwaa3.jpg http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/0/b/0bd5349ab72b1... Compare it to the real thing: http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8270.Desktop_2D00_theme_5F00_0459AA86.png http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-bl...