Sure it did. Tiles on Windows Phone were a big hit for a time. If anything, the problem on that side of things was that they didn't commit and make sure the things that worked on the phone also worked on the "tablet" version.

Instead, they took the approach that "the developers will thank us for charging them an arm and a leg to learn and use the new APIs, like they always have, forgetting that developers often follow users, and almost every user was verbal about hating what MS had done, including Windows phone users who understoo what had been promised then effectively bait-and-switched.

Microsoft's way has just always been so inspiring, you know?

I never got into gnome. Was more of an XFCE guy for a time, enough-so to realize Gnome had "deprecated" anything I liked about GTK. I was more looking for a classic start menu style with minimal overhead, and XFCE gave me that, while most other DE's wouldn't let me do stuff that Windows 95 had been cool with.