My guess as an outsider: The general consensus among techies (since, I think we can say, disproven) was that the tablet would replace the laptop. I would guess MS also bought into the hype and wanted to provide some continuity to its customers in the hope of retaining them in this new tablet world, and was willing to throw desktop use under the bus to make it happen. It doesn't matter if your UI sucks on a physical keyboard and mouse if users rejected those devices.
Instead tablets peaked, then bigger smartphones ate their share instead of tablets taking out the remaining use cases for traditional form factors.
As an insider: Windows developers hated the full-screen start menu and were vocal about it. We were the first ones to experience it and generally thought, "They're not going to ship this... right?" At some point, we were told that the design was set and no amount of complaining would change it.
Windows 8 was designed before the iPad was announced, but that 3 year ship cycle this article discusses came back to bite Microsoft. Their vision was a hybrid system but then Apple came out and solidified themselves as the standard tablet. Microsoft lost their ability to define the market and the market liked Apple's definition better.
At the very least, there was some consensus that we were moving toward some sort of laptop/tablet convergence and Microsoft probably saw an opportunity to one-up Apple which ran (and runs) tablets and laptops on two completely different operating systems.
Instead it seems like in the main, people have (once again) decided that they don't really care to switch between a PC modality and a tablet modality [ADDED: on a single device], however appealing the concept seems on paper. And, as you say, the smartphones that everyone (to a first approximation) owns grew to their approximately maximum size and those are good enough tablets for a lot of people.
The fun thing is that there was never such consensus outside of, seemingly, Redmond and wharever place Unity was developed at. Everybody else did not even expect general-purpose Tablet to be a thing and were frustrated OSes tuned for hardware that wasn't even available.
Gnome 3 is where I lost faith in the Linux community's ability to cohesively come up with a solution to user experience. Every time I log onto a system with Gnome 3 it give me a feeling of dread and anger. Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time. But Gnome 3 was just a complete FU to all the current gnome users. How arrogant.
KDE seems to keep it together. KDE plasma 5 seems an incremental upgrade from what came before, getting rid of some of the weirdness and converging on something sane. Progress at least. I can respect what they're doing.
Microsoft, in all it's bullshit, every few years seems to give the users what they want. Licensing is a headspinner, and privacy is questionable, but otherwise they still make an operating system that feels good to use.
I just can't agree with this. I used Gnome 3 with excitement when it came out. I found that it was unpolished back then, and probably not ready for general use. I switched to XFCE for a while, then openbox, fluxbox, and a number of tiling window managers, then to MATE and finally back to Gnome.
I've been using Gnome now for about three years. I find the hot corner UI to be intuitive (and I find myself trying to use that and the meta-key expose function on other OSes). The favorites dock and the search are things that I use frequently, and the title bar menus make sense to me.
I was a Gnome 2 user for years as well, and yes it was polished and predictable. But it wasn't attractive. I think Gnome 3 was the next logical step for the project as far as contemporary UI patterns go, and it feels very "ergonomic" to me.
> "Gnome 2 had become one of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time."
I would suggest that Pantheon (the DE for Elementary OS) is more polished compared to Gnome 2. Cinnamon (the DE for Linux Mint) is another solid choice if you wanted incremental improvements over Gnome 2.
Way too impressive goals considering the available time? And no possibility to re-evaluate them, because the whole hardware side was depending on some of the new stuff being ready.
For example the new ideas for the UI were quite interesting, but it was quite obvious they had ship it way before it was ready. They were interesting, because they solve one (IMHO) big issue: ordinary users have hard time taking full use of their screen real-estate. Windows are hard to manage and people end up switching between full screen apps, while it would be in many case more effective to use them side-by-side. A tiling window manager would help here.
They didn't solve anything because there were no apps. Not then, not now. There was this new annoying and confusing default where you would fall from time to time, but no apps.
