The difference is between giving useful, actionable feedback versus just being a douche-hat. Maintaining a dialogue with the product team to let them know your concerns and requirements about their product is in the former category. Publishing your beefs on the Internet, or stamping your feet and saying that they are wrong about everything from NTFS to the C++ compiler to Powershell not being in CMD.exe is quite firmly in the latter.

I'm not sure I agree with this. An important part of being a PM, product planner or UX professional is being able to take feedback that might be emotional, angry, confused or even incoherent and make good use of it anyway. If they only paid attention to feedback from people who "thought like MSFT executives" they'd wind up tailoring their products to a pretty narrow slice of their userbase. If anything feedback of the form "I hate Windows 8 and I hate you because it installs a new facebook that broke my googles, bring back the old facebook with the dog!!!" is likely to be taken equally seriously as some developer's politely worded "constructive" suggestion with an elaborate logical argument backing it up. In both cases your unhappiness will be taken seriously, your suggested solution will be ignored and your given reason will be treated as an indirect clue to the puzzle of working out the real reason for your dissatisfaction

I kind of expect it to go over mostly the same stuff as Jensen Harris's UX Week talk, but still curious ...

Personally I think the current model is the correct one and they should just persist with it and flesh it out (apps, settings, cross-app scenarios, better desktop use of things like charms, etc.) but I'm trying to keep an open mind about any new model they do introduce.

I'm definitely interested to see what's behind the locked down Blue UI elements. With luck, whatever it is will be something fresher and more interesting than the boring rumors and speculation we see in the press.

Am I saying everything should be "flat"? Oh jeez I hate that term. If you ever hire a designer, developer or read an article with the words Flat Design in their title, just runaway, run to the mountains, because that person doesn't understand that this isn't about being flat, it's not a style... Styles come and go, like fashion styles... They are hot now, they are dead in two years. The thing Microsoft and now Apple (thank you Ive), and a huge number of UX and UI design agencies are trying to do is to apply the design principles of Modernism. Modernism, you know? The philosophical, fine arts, architecture, cinematographic movement that started in the early 20th century. Bauhaus, Swiss design, International style, Helvetica and geniuses like Massimo Vignelli, Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe, Richard Meier, Dieter Rams, Luis Barragan, Stanley Kubrick and even Jonathan Ive from Apple are just some of the lighthouses and masterminds that spent a century exploring the same things that today's designers are exploring. How to convey stories, and enable user experiences. We simply happen to have a different medium, it's not oil or acrylic, nor brick and mortar, but pixels. Those tiny little sparks of light that we as designers carefully arrange and order. That's our medium, plus the input mechanisms which these days we have plenty. So when someone says 'flat' then the conversation automatically degrades to talking about styles or fashions instead of a timeless movement like Modernism. Read more about the guys I mentioned above, read more about Modernism, the movement, not the style.

Great article.

BTW different people seem to have different ideas of what "responsive web design" means, so to clarify - to me it means "usable in snap view"

I hope they improve discoverability for the other corner hotspots, like add a subtle flash or something. Right now, I think they even violate their own design principles, specifically the "stuff doesn't just appear, it comes from someplace and goes someplace" - when you go to the start screen, the foreground app vanishes in a fade transition...it should fly to the left hand side to indicate that you can switch to it from there!

That's actually exactly how it worked in DP. You're right that it makes more sense conceptually, but unfortunately it was just too heavy an animation to see over and over again, so between providing a more coherent animation scheme and not giving people headaches they chose the latter.

Ian, you are absolutely correct about having desktop icons on the Start screen.  What I really should have said is that I can't get the same integration into those tiles... they aren't "Live" tiles.  (Of course, I've ranted before about the inability for desktop applications to integrate with the formerly-known-as-Metro experience... I won't start on that again.)

Another POV on this is that you can think of the Start screen as conceptually an extension of the Windows 7 taskbar. They both try to unify application launching, switching and notifications (plus instance management and quick actions, in the taskbar's case). So it would be nice if we had more parity and coherence (e.g., ideally using the same or closely related APIs) between what you can do with the taskbar and Start tiles for desktop apps.

(Besides this, tiles for desktop content, especially folders and websites, often just don't look nice or aren't visually distinguishable - folders all use the same ugly folder icon! I would really like a good built-in UX and services for easily associating your own icons for folders and stuff. Basically a more streamlined and service-integrated OblyTile)

The point isn't that the start menu is "bad" and had to be removed because its use is trending downward, or because of the new taskbar. The point is, given that the taskbar takes over many of its functions, how can the start menu be evolved to find a new role and also fit newer trends in use of PCs? The start screen in Windows 8 is an answer to this, it's not the only or necessarily ideal answer, but any problems or deficiencies need to be addressed by actually solving the problems not creating a parallel start menu leading to two places to look for everything and implement everything which just makes no sense.