He and Joe the design guy were the worst thing to happen to Microsoft.
They effectively killed Microsoft's chance of being a phone competitor and set Windows productivity back by close to a decade with Windows Phone, Windows 8 and tiles.
Ridiculous, still high on the kool-aid. Touch on desktop wasn't and isn't appropriate, period. It is simply slower and clumsier than m+kb. The new computers he refers to are mobile devices, a market segment that Microsoft gave up on, and that's the key point, as a separate market, it was only mobile that needed a different approach. The standard format of Windows for desktop didn't need to be thrown away to try capture mobile but Microsoft decided to do that, and defending that decision to this very day is simply in defiance of reality and good business sense.
Apple made iOS specifically to tackle the different requirements on the platforms. Ubuntu did Ubuntu Touch. What really happened is that Microsoft was cheap, tried to short circuit organic adoption and instead crowbar the entire Windows userbase by making Windows worse and displeasing people who they wrote off as legacy users instead of doing the harder job and making a bespoke product.
Microsoft hesitated and took the cheap route and failed to understand how relevant mobile computing would be, just like they didn't get the internet, and now they have to be content with boring old stuffy mouse and keyboard users. Bugger them, that's what they get, and these losers should stop doing these breathy interviews where they pretend like they were success stories instead of dismal failures. We should be getting apologies from these hacks, and nothing else.
I'd like to see an MS exec wax nostalgically on Windows Vista, someday. Perhaps it's still too soon for folks to misremember how bad Longhorn really was.
They effectively killed Microsoft's chance of being a phone competitor and set Windows productivity back by close to a decade with Windows Phone, Windows 8 and tiles.