You essentially move the pointing device (finger or selection box) over the tile you want to activate So a game controller is a (rather terrible) mouse? Do you

You essentially move the pointing device (finger or selection box) over the tile you want to activate So a game controller is a (rather terrible) mouse? Do you understand that Metro was made for touch because such a move the cursor interface is entirely unlike a touch interface? There is a discord here that I don't think you are understanding. The Windows Phone, Windows 8 Metro (on touch screens and tablets) and Xbox One UI are all great and very information dense compared to what you see on competing devices. This information density thing comes up a lot, with absolutely nothing to demonstrate or prove it. Personally I find the Metro interface to be very information poor, and I cannot comprehend how such a claim could even be considered. That dearth of information (form far before function) has been one of the primary complaints about Metro. only DNA from your list Are you talking from a marketing perspective or something? Because no, my list is precise for its intended purpose: Those are cases where Microsoft thought that "unifying" was going to save the day, and the end result was anything but. Where divisions were essentially forced into a vision that didn't match the actual needs of their products because synergy or something. As to .NET, it was the primary reason SQL Server went five years between versions of 2000 and 2005, coming out with little changed but for added .NET integration, to find that close to no one actually uses, and a "built in .NET" management studio that had far less features than the version before it, while using dramatically more resources. All so they could talk about unifying. XNA Studio is yet another example of unifying technologies in poorly considered ways, and that alone close to killed independent game creation on the Xbox. Are you going to argue that being able to reuse all of the code behind an app's user interface across all of Microsoft's products isn't a good direction to move? If it's for dogma, or if it's trying to mash together highly dissimilar products, yes, it's a demonstrably terrible direction to move. The single and only group that cares at all about this overlap are lazy amateur Microsoft-world developers, and the result of their ill considered efforts does absolutely nothing to advance Windows Mobile, Windows Desktop, or the Xbox. I mean seriously, Windows Phone remains a death pile of largely terrible apps, and the few decent apps Microsoft had to essentially pay the developers to make. Where is this great advantage yielded? As for the Xbox, 0% of professional game developers care one iota that there is anything in common between platforms. They really don't. Hell, they care more about abstractions that make it easier to port between the Xbox One and PS4, and eventually to iOS and Android.