It worked so incredibly well on the Windows Phone 7, but translated horribly to the Windows 8 desktop. Especially the weird mouse gesture to get to the neutered Settings panel, the redundancy of that panel to begin with, and the entire UWP app experience. Windows 10 was a great marriage of these two concepts, even if the Settings menu was still redundant, it was functional. Then comes along Windows 11 even it's most recent feature updates feels like a half-finished UI.

Metro worked perfectly well on tablets. And every OS since W8 has actually kept some version of Metro (in the form of e.g. larger touch-targets), because having a single version of Windows UI for both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard computers, is what enabled the creation of the "2-in-1" or "convertible" touchscreen notebook, a design that basically every modern Windows notebook instantiates.

Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)

That article was written in 2014, just a few years after the trend started, and still today, over a decade later, Apple, once famous for its UX, is still failing to follow it.

What puzzles me is that information like this is out there. How did Apple get it so wrong?

I am hopeful for the new UX VP. He has his work cut out for him.

> Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft?

Remember also the "Get a Mac" ads that parodied Windows Vista permission dialogs, but now macOS is a permission dialog hell.

Tim Cook was an IBMer. I'm sure that Cook was a fine hire as an operations manager, but I doubt that Steve Jobs intended for someone like Cook to be in charge of everything at Apple, including UI design. (Jobs never put Jony Ive in charge of software, by the way, whereas Cook did.) Indeed, I doubt that Jobs groomed anyone to be his successor. By the time Jobs learned he had a fatal illness, it was too late, and he had to turn over the company to someone the board of directors would accept, which was Cook. Jobs was CEO but didn't own the company; infamously, the Apple board of directors chose John Sculley over Jobs in an earlier power struggle.