They can never turn the iconography completely flat and remove all the aero iconography. It just wouldn't mesh with the other icons from other programs anyway because other companies will not be making their icon for their own software flat. Or if you have an old program even if they did it would stand out. Not to mention the extreme flat look of the metro while can be nice is hard to see on a desktop. With all the multitasking and such going on the flatness would make it severely awkward and limited in displaying information or helping the user distinguish something. Their execution is not well done. They've turned the simplicity idea and overdone it for most parts. The buttons look horrible to close, minimize, maximize etc. It does not stand out. They need to take what they did with the zune desktop program(not the current iteration but the one that still has the trackbar having a circle(that made it easier to view where the track was at) and buttons that are 2.5D. Google is actually doing a much more decent job of having it be in-between. It's not overtly flat and not overdone with effects, a happy medium. I love the typography on the zune HD and they used it very well there with different weights here it's one weight, different sizes and it's the weight that is hard to read against possibly busy backgrounds. They extreme flattening makes the typography only really legible when the background is a solid color. This takes out the possibilities with interesting or more intricate backgrounds. Also there was uppercase use of the typography here it's always in capitalized form. It makes the typography lack excitement and hierarchy. I getting it as simple as possible to put the content forth but you need to be able to see the controls as well and the flatness makes it visually difficult to see. In the case of the normal window in windows 8 it doesn't even complement the desktop or the metro. It just looks like they removed all the effects and I rather they designed it like the zune software or did the middle road like google. There is nothing wrong with the effects anyway. It has always been how you well you execute it. If they had done a great job they wouldn't feel it was cheesy now. I don't get how what they've done is anymore authentic then people who use effects. I'm happy they fixed things performance wise but visually they didn't execute that well here. The system is not bad but looking at it is a different story.