The wheel has been around for thousands of years and has not changed in basic design.
Actually, the wheel has changed a lot. But, the fact is, this is a bad comparison, because a wheel is the only possibly way to have means of conveyance where some part of it has to touch ground. There are solutions like tank treads, and rails, but they still use wheels as their basic system. The only other solutions are air, magnetic, hover, etc.. none of them use wheels, but they don't touch the ground either.
Well I still after all these years cannot come to grips with the HORRID RIBBON interface that is totally UNintuitive and takes up screen space and you expect me to accept the METRO interface?
Actually, the Ribbon and Metro are both designed to address similar problems. And that's scalability, both of function and input type. Microsoft has written a lot on how Metro was designed to address the problem of constantly growing menus and how things were so buried nobody knew where to find anything. All of the top requests for users were functions that actually existed already, but nobody knew how to find them because the menus were a maze.
The start page addresses a similar problem.. that of a growing number of apps. With the advent of the windows store, people can easily have thousands of apps installed, and menus become way too difficult to maneuver. In addition, menus are very difficult for handicapped and elderly people to use, and are horrible with touch interfaces.
Maybe the start page is not the best possible solution, but for many things it's a far better solution than menus. The same is true of the Ribbon. Some day, they will probably find a better solution, but today there hasn't been one devised.
Change for change sake is not good. Change for progress is good.
Neither the ribbon or Metro are change for the sake of change. They address very real problems. Some of those problems are problems that are expected to occur, and you may not realize yet what they're for.. but you certainly would if left in the old way of doing things.
As a product designer I can tell you that some things are so perfectly designed or suited to their environment that at best you can only refine them and not change them grossly like with METRO. METRO is purely designed for smartphones and tablets and not suitable for PC use.
If you are truly a product designer, then you should be able to understand Microsofts reasons for doing what they've done. You should also be aware of the fact that sometimes you have to make compromises to address the whole of the system, rather than catering to a small minority.
Microsoft expects to sell orders of magnitude more touch based devices than all desktop PC's ever created over the next decade, and the desktop users will want their desktops to behave more like the devices they use most of the time (their phones and tablets).
A large part of the problem is that Microsoft is anticipating what is coming, and many people will not see the need today for it. They will in the future, however.
