Wants to do the same thing with SkyDrive. I wonder who has the advantage?

If you look at it from Microsoft's point of view Windows 8 makes plenty of sense. They gain tablet and phone market shares by leveraging their desktop monopoly. Further they will finally be putting antivirus companies out of business by integrating it into the OS and strongly encouraging Metro apps (They're making it as hard as possible to run unsigned applications. Before they had that support only in IE). They also improve the security of their OS by locking it up and making it a walled garden. They convince developers to pay them for releasing applications that they could release for free before.

I wonder if the same people at MS who are insisting on Metro on the desktop are the same people who insisted on the desktop interface on WinCE phones. Maybe MS thinks touch monitors will take over on the desktop or tablets will largely outsell desktops.

Many companies will choose immediate profits over maintainability. Sure maintainability is nice to have but if you have to choose you pick the money you can earn sooner over the potential savings later. Your customers don't pay you more because you have more maintainable code.

Start UI? They removed the Start button. Their alternative is a usability nightmare. Maybe they want to help grow the market for third party Start buttons.

Godwin'd already?

Lock in was how MS got so much control. Without they are actually forced to respond more to market forces like everybody else.

What about the migration of people to Linux that was supposed to happen because of how bad Vista was?

The problem is open source developers generally are clueless about what users actually want in an OS. Backwards compatibility and usability. With Microsoft fumbling Metro on the desktop this would be a perfect opportunity for other OS's.

Jesus believed in Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. Consider Mathew 19:4-6 and Mathew 24:37-39. It also doesn't say that the Earth does not move. In fact at Job 26:7, it also says the Earth is hanging upon nothing.

Like you said there can't be multiple true faiths that conflict with each other. There's only 1 Bible that's the most widely available book which contains explains fully the past, present, future. It is also scientifically and historically accurate and contains fulfilled prophecy. In the Bible God tells you what happened, what he's doing about it, and what the result will be. Also there's only one hearer of prayer that would care whether people want to listen to him (Psalms 65:2, 2 Chronicles 16:9). If you pray to him with sincerity for guidance and he answers you by helping you understand his Bible and learn more about him that would certainly provide evidence.

There's no such thing as a centrifugal force (http://xkcd.com/123/)

There should be a way to pause tabs till you actually switch to them?

Well Microsoft is trying to force everyone to like Metro. They probably think if they can make the desktop look more bland the metro UI might appear a little more appealing. However, it goes against their plans for Windows 8 to have a software rasterizer to allow gpu poor machines to run Aero. Ideally that is what they should have done for Vista. That way there would have been less outrage about not being able to run Aero on Vista compatible PC's.

Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware. Also many programmers knew assembly language for extra optimization. If the programmers from back then were writing for the hardware we have now software would be much more efficient.