You were using your personal experience, "I do this X, I do Y". That's not valid because you aren't the target market.

The people who use Office constantly most likely are able to use more features more effectively more often as a result of the ribbon. If they were to look at there 2003 documents and compare them to their 2013 documents they would see a difference. I'm not sure if you are pulling a valid sample or not, your typical Office user doesn't have strong opinions on computer issues and likely is easily led in the conversation towards and opinion depending on who they are speaking with.

People who need to stand and use a interface a tiny minority? Google's estimate on number of computer panels currently in all uses is 10b globally. If even .1% are being used for an extended period of time that's a substantial chunk of the market.

As for artist,s, architects... they come in around 2% of users. More than say developers.

If you don't need to use Office much or a competitor you aren't the target market.

Assuming you aren't vision impaired
if you regularly use Office applications and have that problem do a training video.

Can you point me to a new input medium aside of keyboard and mouse that offers better control in a desktop environment?

Yes the digitizing pallet. That's been used by artists for a long time. It is also particularly important for people who need to operate laptops one handed, like workers who are standing.

I want a DESKTOP operating system. If something else works better on a tablet, do something else on a tablet. Simple as that. Even Apple was smart enough to know that one size fits all works in operating systems about as well as it does with underwear.

Microsoft has always believed in ubiquitous computing. That people want to run the same applications in different environments and not buy their applications over and over and over. It may be that Apple is right that people do want to do that, but I have trouble believing the same people who whine constantly about how much Windows upgrades cost really want to pay 4x over for the software.

What would make sense? You still open files. You still save them. And you still need to close them (or have some means of releasing locks on them so that they can be moved/copied/backed up/etc).

You don't open them anymore. You do a destructive overwrite not some sort of data append. So you don't need to close. Now if you think about, why do you save them? You already have the system regularly saving updates anyway, saving is cheap. Why bother with you saving? Instead maybe have something like marked versions.

This is, essentially, what an idea "Event Viewer" should be doing.

Exactly but it isn't quite that simple. Because you don't want to just view them you need to have a queue that passes messages back and forth. The human may want to pick between dozens of events and understand which ones are easy or important or time critical or...

When you're talking about a 55" TV, you're talking about what? SD Widescreen? HD? SHD? 4K? What? Resolution's the issue, not the device itself.

No... not at all. As pixels get physically bigger ratios have to change. For example the amount of white space between characters in a font increases much more slowly than the size of a character needs to increase. That is a 5 point font magnified 200% is not the same as the 10 point font. Resolution is not the only issue. DPI matters a great deal.

More important than that though is that size of screen determines how long a person will want to use it. Sligh increases in screen size induce drastic changes in willingness to engage for extended periods. So for example the average phone (4" screen) is 30 seconds. The average watch slightly more than a second. Average 15" screen is 1/2 hour.

But forcing everyone (including enterprise partners, where retaining costs MONEY), over to a new UI paradigm when there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the old one, is Just Fucking Stupid.

The rest of the post was about what was intrinsically wrong with the old one.

Face it. Standard desktop is 1-3 monitors, a keyboard, directional controller (mouse or mouse simulant (rollerball, touchpad, or joystick)), speakers and a microphone.

I don't have to face it because it is not true. Besides quibbling with whether microphone / speakers are really standard the big point is that work has been migrating away from desktop / laptops now for almost a decade. The form factors on which people want to work are shifting. So that's not standard. The work moves.

And there was DEFNITELY no reason behind applying that crap to Server 2012!

  I do see the reason for mixed factor laptops like the Yoga or Surface. Microsoft traditionally wants the server GUI to be close to the desktop GUI to reduce training complexity. I don't think it goes beyond that.

What would be the upside of them letting you skip it? They want to provide web services they need an account. The same way as you needed a mouse in older versions.

Nobody would mind a better OS, but when the GUI has reached the pinnacle of usefulness, why try to force a change?

Because your assumption is way off. The GUI wasn't at a pinnacle. A few examples:

1) The file: open, save, close is really designed around a dual floppy paradigm. It makes no sense at all with SSD hardware.
2) As the number of system services require notification increase integrated notification handling becomes key
3) As device types become much more variable (ranging from a watch to a 55+" TV) graphics need to switch more readily
4) As input devices became more variable applications needed to take better advantage of them.
etc...

Windows 7 was not a pinnacle. It did some things reasonable well on some particular types of hardware that were rapidly becoming less important and mainstream for an ever shrinking percentage of the population.

That's what the Ribbon does, it hides based on context. Which means they can have more items not fewer.

Continuum creates a continuum between desktop (windows 7) and Metro, integrating the two into a single GUI. That names makes sense.

  Charms bar is a play on cntl-c to end where Win-C is used to bring up a bar to switch contexts (search web or change settings). At least the C makes sense.

Well of course the right way to do that would be to make the new style of icons mandatory. But forcing change through was the Windows 8.0 days. Microsoft chickened out with 8.1 and so now you get the half assed slow movement in a general direction kind of change.

I tried installing Windows 8.1 a couple weeks ago, and I spent 20 minutes looking for a way to get it to let me install without a Microsoft account, and couldn't find one. I found a way to get it to let you set up a new account, once the install is finished, without a Microsoft account, and that's the best I could do. Even that wasn't easy.

But I tried going through each step carefully, looking for any button I might have missed, and there just wasn't anything. It hit a certain point, and it would not let me proceed without an account.

Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure that you don't just need an email account, but a Microsoft Live account (or whatever they're calling it now). That Microsoft account doesn't need to include an outlook.com email account, and it can be bound to an email address that's not on a Microsoft domain, but you need to open an actual account for Microsoft services.

And if that's right, that's what annoys me. I wouldn't mind if they set the default to use a Microsoft account. I wouldn't mind if it warned you strenuously, "If you don't set up or use one of these accounts, some Windows features may not work." I just don't like being forced to have an active online account with someone in order to install an operating system.

You know, aside from the "Metro" or "Modern" interface, I don't have a problem with Windows 8. It seems like they've addressed that, so I'm not sure what else you're hoping for.

Actually, I do have one other annoyance: their seeming insistence that you have some kind of an Windows web account (outlook.com or whatever) in order to run the OS I understand that they're actually doing something kind of neat with that, but it's pretty annoying that they won't let you skip it during the Windows setup.