> It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.

fair. but that struck me as strange even then. if anything, visual studio should have adopted the all-lowercase typography of the original metro-style design language from zune and windows phone 7, not AN ALL-UPPERCASE ONE.

Perhaps that was just another way that Windows 8 Metro-style apps' design and developer platform was like Windows Phone 7's Metro style, yet different in seemingly gratuitous ways. That is something I would attribute to internal Microsoft politics. Steven Sinofsky and Terry Myerson (leader of Windows Phone at that time) never really got along, and in the Microsoft philosophy of that era where engineering divisions were completely locked down from each other by default, that rivalry would have discouraged what little natural collaboration would have happened anyway.