They do (have friends in the shell team @ MS). It's just really hard for them to hit the right balance between compatibility, which is _super_ important to thei

They do (have friends in the shell team @ MS). It's just really hard for them to hit the right balance between compatibility, which is _super_ important to their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, vs. providing a clean crap-free experience to consumers. For better or worse, the "consumer" user of Windows -- a person at home, without an IT support desk, who purchased his computer himself at a store -- captured a lot of attention inside Microsoft for this release. I'm not at all surprised to see more Apple-like behavior from them, e.g. (1) restricting what Windows RT can run to the software available in the windows app store, (2) completely breaking app compatibility for older (WinForms) apps on WinRT, (3) getting way more draconian about hardware requirements for the Phone (specification of button counts/sizes, etc.), (4) having a "Signature" edition of windows. MS has been fighting this battle for decades -- most blue screens were caused by crappy hardware drivers; they knew this but couldn't fix the problem without hugely breaking compatibility.