I'm fine with Microsoft's new logo. It certainly looks much better than any of their previous logos. However, their new flat gray color scheme with 80's era upper case menu items is crap. It is painful to look at. I've been thinking a lot about why Microsoft moved to such crap color scheme and the only thing I can come up with is they are trying to distinguish themselves from Apple and maybe Google. Apple has a similar color scheme but the difference is they make tasteful use of shiny buttons, bevels and drop shadow. It seems like Microsoft didn't want to copy them so they decided to go with the exact opposite. Now, I'm definitely not an Apple fan boy but seriously, Apple's site looks 100x better than Microsoft's. In fact, I think Microsoft's new color scheme and branding strategy widened the gap. If I didn't know better, I'd say a decree came down from the top that the next branding/marketing strategy had to differentiate Microsoft from their competition. Microsoft definitely accomplished that... in the worst way possible.