Ars: How has your opinion of Windows 8 evolved or changed over the past 10 years?
Sinofsky: First, so much of the feedback about Windows 8 focused on removal of the Start menu—the literal menu—which we knew at the time had reached its functional limits. So in many ways, I think the feedback overplayed the role of the Start menu much the same way the early Windows critics overplayed the removal of "C

>" from the core experience. Yet, of course, like the early Windows, we had affordances to keep that around (the desktop in Windows

.
Second, 90 percent (that's a rhetorical stat) of computing is now done via grids of apps, launched by touch, filling a screen. Mobile browsing dominates desktop browsing, and overall screen time on mobile vastly outpaces desktop. Desktop computing is on a decline. That assumes desktops are used at all, and for a few billion people, they will never see desktop computers as traditionally envisioned.
So in that way, I think we tried to bring Windows to the natural next step of computing. Our vision for doing that was just too much and too soon, and as a result Windows ended up not moving forward and today retains its secure position—though that is in a shrinking desktop world, one also challenged by Mac much more so in 2022 than it was in 2012.