I don't disagree with that, but I do understand where some of it was going.
I've read a lot of the building windows and building office blogs, and when you read the reasons, it starts to make more sense.
For PCs, hybrid sleep is the new thing, shutting it down isn't so common, for tablets, you pretty much never do a shutdown. So the fact that it's not quite as easy just isn't a big deal. Also, it's easy on a tablet, it's a PC it's awkward on.
I do think that the MS account nagging is a little over the top and should be less, but again, you need the same exact thing for an iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, iPad, etc. etc., that's just where things are going. I do greatly wish that it was easier to control a batch of those from an IT standpoint in an organization. I just hope to set some policies and get ahead of figuring it out before I find all of our files are all over personal account SkyDrives everywhere.
On a desktop, I don't see losing any functionality vs. Win7 by not having an MS account, but it's true that you're missing a bunch of the new features.
I don't mind some customization, but since I have to deal with a bunch of machines all the time, I don't like to see them all super different.
One huge thing that drove me crazy, and still gets me is that my way of opening a new IE window was always Windows Key > down arrow > enter, and now that doesn't work, so I have to actually use my mouse. Irritating as hell, but I'll get over it.
There are some clusters around the control panels, etc. I don't think it really would have taken more than a few extra UI people to port all of them to the new UI, the old stuff sucks with touchscreens.
Wins:
Sharing / Search / App switching on tablets / Speed / Hidden things like storage spaces (which rocks)
Losses:
Control Panels / Trying to run in a full desktop mode / Commercials (Apple always wins because they show what you can actually DO with something) / MS account nagging
We should start a new thread on Office 2013, that somehow went backwards from even the preview version in a lot of ways, oops.
And people who are still on XP shouldn't even read this thread, their opinion doesn't count.
