First, sorry for intruding on a WindowBlinds thread, Neil.
If I sound bitter, it's because I am. As a developer, I have lost ALL TRUST I ever had in Microsoft.
For me it started when they killed classic Visual Basic and replaced it with Visual Basic .NET. They lied when they tried to convince other developers that VB .NET was just an evolution of classic VB. It was not, it was a brand new language and your old classic VB code wouldn't even work on it. Even if you managed to convert your classic VB code to VB .NET, it would not work the same in anything other than very simple projects because the languages are so different. .NET is heavy and extremely slow - there's a reason why Microsoft own programmer's don't use it in Windows, after all, but still stick to C++ instead.
I'm all for evolution, but evolution is NOT a clean cut with the past, as they did with .NET and are now doing with Windows 8. With .NET Microsoft forced classic VB developers to follow Microsoft's vision of how the future should be, in the process throwing away the most popular programming language EVER and BILLIONS of man hours of experience and knowledge.
Windows became successful because it was built on an open platform (the PC) and was, itself, an open platform. Microsoft's plan with Windows 8 is to become like Apple: they want to force ALL software to be sold through them (Windows app store) and take a 30% cut on other people's hard work (all of it), but they can't do it while Windows is still an open platform. So, the solution is to kill Windows as we know it (as it happened with classic VB) and turn it into a closed platform: Windows RT (i.e.; Metro apps).
Make no mistake: they want to, and will, kill the desktop and the Win32 API.
If they succeed, no software will ever be admitted into the Windows app store that does not follow Microsoft rules (whatever they are at the time) and without Microsoft's blessing. You can all say good-bye to the kind of applications Stardock and Winstep make because mostly they provide functionality that can only be accomplished by 'bending' Microsoft rules. Like Big Brother, Microsoft will rule supreme and we will *all* lose the diversity and benefits of an open platform.
I hope they crash and burn and that Stephen Sinofsky, and all his 'buddies' at Microsoft who share the same school of thought, go back to the pits of hell they must have surely come from.