They took up 10x more space than they need to. And we had the information thing way, way before.

I can see the weather on my taskbar right now in KDE, no app launch required. Except it's not a giant 1 inch by 1 inch square plastered on my start menu. It's a little text showing me a cloud and temperature.

Also, live tiles just did not work a lot of the time. Most of the time, when you looked at them, it would just show the icon surrounded by a sea of color, like a little island. I'm assuming because the daemon is either not running or has ridiculously slow start up time, whereas the start menu might only be open for fractions of a second.