I'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each

I'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each non-ME desktop/workstation iteration of Windows during that period -- 2000, XP, and Vista and their service packs -- provided significant advancement in security and features, even if in Vista's case, the total package was arguably undesirable. The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years. I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006. Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.