You seem to have a wild hair stuck up your butt. Let's examine reality for a moment.
Balmer, whether you agree with him or not, is not poor. That man made enough money for a lifetime with MS, even if you overlook the time when he ran the company. His severance likely totals more than what the average person will make in a lifetime. He also wasn't doing anything new. Years ago Apple rolled out a unified UI, and artists still praise that "innovation." MS wants the same uniform experience, but their implementation should have been less jarring. The unified UI isn't inherently a bad thing, but Balmer's push to unify the UI without regards to the user feedback was insanely detrimental.
UI and performance are very different things. A skull knob on the end of my gear shift lever doesn't make it faster than any other car, the engine and transmission do. Windows 8 better managed system resources, and therefore performed better. You can disagree with the implementation of the UI, but arguing that you threw it away and therefore there was no improvement is ignorant.
You believe your information is safe as long as you don't submit to the online stores? Perhaps you should withdraw farther from reality. In the last two years there have been giant breaches in credit card information security from brick and mortar stores. Somehow you are arguing that an online store is less secure. I submit that neither is truly secure, and you need to manage your data rather than moan about potential security breaches. That is the only acceptable way to address the reality of the situation.
Finally, "billions of others" disagree with what I am saying. This is, potentially, the dumbest thing I have ever heard. There are about 7.2 billion people currently on the planet. Assuming one in four can afford a computer for personal use, that's 1.8 billion potential computers. Assuming again that about half of these computer users can run windows, we've got a potential market of 0.9 billion computers. As MS has sold several hundred thousand copies of Windows 8, the numbers don't seem to add up to any sort of reality. Even people who agree that Windows 8 is not a good step forward (of which I am a member) have to call your foolishness here.
If you hate Windows 8, that's fine. If you're going to argue as to why it sucks, have a good reason. Screaming that is sucks "because" doesn't fix anything. Saying that the UI is backward tells the people designing the next OS something they can tackle. Without actual quantifiable goals you aren't moving towards a productive resolution.
