[Spooky23]

The client side tools have been in purgatory for years, as things were in stasis when MS screwed up the XP to Longhorn or whatever they were calling the next generation client then.

The server side is a totally different story. Windows Server, system center, sql, etc have been going gangbusters for years.

[Aaronontheweb]

Agreed. On the client side, a lot of effort was put into WinJS and the whole ModernUI experience.

Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, my guess is that you'll see some of the innovation behind ModernUI apps back-propagated to thick client desktop stuff in the next major release of Windows.