Desktops with touch are stupid.
My monitor is up in front of my face, and a good distance back on my desk, not down on the front of my desk where my hands are.
I'm not sitting at my computer to give my shoulders a workout. Besides which, any idiot who gets fingerprints all over my nice monitor deserves a slapping, even if its me.
Having touch sized buttons on the screen makes the mouse and keyboard experience worse - everything has to be bigger, with giant borders and separation because your finger is ~100px or more across, and my mouse pointer has a single-pixel click area.
Te problem with the hybrid approach is simply that I, or any anyone like me, can't or won't use touch for our desktop use, so why should a touch oriented UI forcibly impinge upon our experience?
They didn't keep the desktop as it was - they removed the start button and a bunch of context menus and hid them in those ridiculous 'charms' pop-outs. The start screen is an enormous waste of time. If they were optional, or the defaults changed based on whether a touch screen was present it might be different, but they are not optional, or even configurable without third party software.
I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't change things. I think the start menu could have been re-drawn as something visually like a charm menu, fading in from the left edge of the screen, so long as it doesn't take you away from what you are doing it would have been fine.
Having touch sized buttons on the screen makes the mouse and keyboard experience worse - everything has to be bigger, with giant borders and separation because your finger is ~100px or more across, and my mouse pointer has a single-pixel click area.
Te problem with the hybrid approach is simply that I, or any anyone like me, can't or won't use touch for our desktop use, so why should a touch oriented UI forcibly impinge upon our experience? They didn't keep the desktop as it was - they removed the start button and a bunch of context menus and hid them in those ridiculous 'charms' pop-outs. The start screen is an enormous waste of time. If they were optional, or the defaults changed based on whether a touch screen was present it might be different, but they are not optional, or even configurable without third party software.
I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't change things. I think the start menu could have been re-drawn as something visually like a charm menu, fading in from the left edge of the screen, so long as it doesn't take you away from what you are doing it would have been fine.