Win 7 was the first MS OS that didn't actually NEED prettying-up.
In your opinion! Being that it bore little or no difference to Vista - which I had been customising for about 3 years already - I sure as hell felt the need to dress up/conceal MS' offering as a UI in Win 7. True, Win 7 pretty much worked right out of the box [largely due to the innovations of Vista, but it positively wasn't pretty, not by any stretch of the imagination.
The plain black and white menu may have been a welcome relief from the Fisher Price look of XP, but it quickly became as boring as bat shit in Vista, so by the time it had been adopted for Win 7 it was barely tolerable. Thank goodness for WB and all the skinners who create for it.
And no, I'm not infatuated with Win 8. It is a good OS and I like using it because under the hood it is infinitely better than Win 7. However, I will drop it like a hot potato for Win 9 when it is released, because under the hood it will be superior and the best OS ever created.
MS-can-do-no-wrong has been demonstrated 'fail' by 8...
Oh, MS demonstrated its 'fail' capabilities long before Win 8. Not only was there the debacle that was Millennium, there was that ghastly GUI it plastered all over XP, which was an 'alright' OS in its day, under the hood, that is, but certainly not brilliant by any means. Sure, XP introduced some innovations, but it wasn'y until Vista, then eventually Win 7 that we began to see real under-the-hood innovation. However, both were merely stepping stones to Win 8 and beyond.... with Win 9 being innovatively astounding under the hood.
As for MS' 'fail' in Win 8, yes, it made mistakes... the second largest being the ommission of the start button and menu. Its largest mistake was assuming the buying public would embrace a cross-platfom OS that Metro was key to. I'm not so keen on the Metro IU for the deskop myself, well not set as the default UI, at least, but it is positively fantastic on my phone and on tablet devices.
Thing is, Metro is not the be all and end all of Win 8 on a desktop. It is so much more than that underneath... not that I'm going to convince anyove who fears/hates change and hated it from word go.
Oh well, roll on Win 9... the subtle change from an 8 to a 9 will mark the new round of OS hate and anti-MS speak, and it will be a welcome, if only small change to the conversation.
The Pirate hath spoken.... aarrgghh! 
