I've added the newest blog post to the OP. In this post, the author reflects on how the discussion has gone so far with regards to the Ribbons, Metro and Media Center.
-------------------Reflecting on our first conversations (part 2)------------------- Here the reflection is continued from the last blog post, covering the Ribbon system, the Metro design and the Media Center. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The progressive or hierarchical rendering of features is the world we came from—some features are keyboard only, some context menu only, some top-level toolbars, some on toolbars you had to show/hide, some on menus or submenus, etc. This collection of mechanisms doesn’t work well for anyone except those who invest a lot of time. Of course if you invest a lot of time you become a very outspoken opponent of change. Perhaps there is some of that? I was a strong proponent of the Office 2000 “adaptive menus” that literally drove people crazy, and those were a deliberate attempt to have less clutter and less surface area. One failure is not a trend but the lesson that “hiding is not simplifying” is valuable I think. [...] In many of the comments, people primarily focused on Metro as what I would say are the graphical elements of the user interface—it was Metro v. Aero. We’ve seen a clear turn where Aero is the past and Metro is the future. And with that a strong desire for the existing Windows experience to take on a new look or a Metro redesign. These comments are usually focused on style and looking "old" or "new." Generally, those details of the visual styling come later in the engineering process, but we wrongly assumed that this was known. Stating that, we could have short-circuited this concern. [...] While not a central topic of feedback, I received about 50 emails about Media Center. I want to reassure customers that Media Center will definitely be part of Windows 8. No doubt about it. Knowing how strong the support for Media Center is among pre-release testers, we still have work to do to make sure the quality and compatibility with add-ins is what you would expect even in pre-release (as with any release of Windows, compatibility is a major effort and when we work on the underlying video engine, as one example, we have to make sure features that push these areas receive adequate coverage). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
