Reading through the comments there isn't too much disagreement about the underlying OS its with Metro.

I first used a computer back in 1981 and seen and used a lot of UIs over the years as well as using different UIs over different systems at the same time, hence I don't tend to invest effort in learning the ins and outs. On a desktop machine without a touchscreen I flip between desktop and metro and am fine with search to find something as that's how I find things on the Internet. My typing speed isn't so bad having used all those CLIs over the years.

Metro with a touchscreen works and in fact for my three year old she finds it awkward that my 2010 Mac Book Pro doesn't have a screen that responds to touch and what's this mouse thing on my Windows 8 desktop. Is Metro perfect, no, but at least its a start to move away from a desktop metaphor that was introduced way back when, in a world dominated by mobiles / browsers is the desktop metaphor still relavant?

My intention was to start a debate as I know my opinion about Windows 8 isn't mainstream.

As someone who is doing this activity right now I 100% agree. These days you have to know your IT costs as if you were running it as your own business. For our activity our starting point was if the company was starting tomorrow, how would we do things and working back from there.

This also helps with the IT shop changing the mentality of having to provision all the IT instead of say cloud services for commodity services etc. As the OP said, phrasing IT spend in terms of commercial outcome will help with your case and no doubt you'll find that actually there are a number of areas where the world has moved on and you can do things better and or cheaper.

An example quoted in the original question was clusters used for computations, do they need to be kit that is housed in a company data centre, what about using Amazon Web Service clusters to do these computations? It may not be the right decision but its worth a look as there are a number of case studies where cloud IAAS can provided massive burst capability over a short time scale for tiny amounts of money.

It's the best OS MS have produced in my opinion, runs well and like the UI and yes I'm running a desktop computer! I use OSX, iOS, Ubuntu and Windows so maybe am used to switching UIs so learning Metro was no big deal compared to someone who has only seen the Start button all their computer life.

Your tax dollars at work here people.

Reminds me of:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Agree, you need to have some acceptance criteria and process where you pay for functionality that you have deemed acceptable. The product specs and so one would form part of that criteria along with any testing cases to support it.

Once past that stage any further bugs that come to light after acceptance is a paid for change request as you've accepted the unit of work and have to have taken responsibility for it being deemed correct.

Software development is like creating a prototype for something new every time, if it wasn't you'd just buy or subscribe to an existing service. It's the nature of the beast that bugs will crop up that might not even be captured until hit by an edge case that the user creates no matter what spec etc have been written.

Finally you saw what happened at Jurassic Park when the 'I won't pay for bugs no matter what' line is taken :)

I know a lot of people that never do any of the things you've mentioned, they're happy with what a Chromebook offers

Got data to back this up as we're moving away from IE as the standard browser to using Chrome with auto update turned on. Decoupling the browser from the OS is very much a step in the right direction.

Traditional corporate IT, especially those that worship Microsoft forget that they were once IT shops and not Microsoft shops.

And yet having a modern always to date browser on the desktop is exactly what my enterprise wants, we keep IE around for legacy apps like the one you've mentioned.

The last version of flight simulator still has new 3rd party products coming out for it and from what I understand was making MS a profit. You can't buy brand loyality like that.

And for say 99% of the time your approach is correct and then there is the 1% of the time that the entrepreneur comes up with something that disrupts an entire industry and the Managers are unable to compete and adapt.

Managers can manage sustainable innovation fine and entrepreneurs are fantastic for disruptive innovation which in practically every case managers will kill. You need both if you want to excel before a startup comes along and kills your business.

The marketplace is the only place where success or failure will be defined so release something there and iterate.

Companies in China do it a lot whereas in the West we try and get something perfect before release. Magazines are the exception as it is often cheaper to launch than to do the research to see if it would succeed or not.

Would win, else just go Play EVE Online as that has the immersion only one universe populated with players can bring.

Fantastic, I'm off to start a cloud hosting service outside the US as the government just killed their industry dead!

Hint to cloud industry: use your money to buy some laws in your favour.

So money can be spent on innovation rather than lawyers?