Whether a person wants a completely Windows experience or not has no bearing on unification being beneficial overall.
I personally don't believe that they are worse experiences. The Windows Phone UI is loved by pretty much everyone who uses it. It's a similar story with Windows 8. Read reviews from people who are actually using the operating system and not just reacting out of fear of change.
One of Microsoft's strengths is how diverse their portfolio is. Adding to that the fact that Microsoft products are working together now better than they ever have before. Breaking the company apart is simply ridiculous.
You are free to believe what you want. However, Windows 8 is an unmitigated disaster. Surface is an unmitigated disaster. Windows Phone is absolutely ignored. Bing is largely ignored. Internet Explorer has lost large swaths of marketshare.
Microsoft is trying to unify an experience that no one cares about. They're building products that no one wants to use. And the reason no one wants to use them is because they are being stymied by this ridiculous notion that they would have a common experience, but an experience that no one wants to use because they are stymied.
When Surface came out, I very much wanted to buy one for my parents, because it looked like exactly what they needed. I spent 45 mins at the Microsoft Store, and I didn't end up getting it. It was terrible. Sometimes, I didn't understand which way to swipe, I didn't understand why there was Flash but some websites wouldn't work, and then sometimes I would get the Windows task bar, and didn't know why. Compare this to the iPad which is almost a perfect experience, because it's so much easier to use.
Microsoft has stymied themselves by trying to take the core Windows experience, and then hammering it into the tablet experience. And then they take this really shitty experience, and then hammer that back into the desktop experience. It's like taking a photocopy of a photocopy.
If they allowed their teams to make the best product they could, they might succeed in the same way Google has succeeded. But forcing everyone to pray at the temple of Windows is what is ruining Microsoft in 2013 and beyond. They need to split up and forget this unification delusion.
Windows 8 has more users than all versions of OS X combined. If that's an "unmitigated disaster", what does that make OS X?
Windows Phone has overtaken iOS in Latin America and holds the number two spot for mobile devices. Windows Phone has also overtaken iOS in Italy, and is less than a percentage point away from taking over in Germany as well. Across Europe Windows Phone market share has doubled from this time last year, while iOS continues to decline. Windows Phone is the fastest growing mobile OS worldwide. Nokia's customer satisfaction has surpassed all Android manufacturers and is right on the heels of Apple. None of this evidence supports your claim that Windows Phone is "absolutely ignored".
Bing handles roughly 30% (Bing + Yahoo) of internet search traffic in the US. A far cry from being "largely ignored".
None of this paints a picture of "an experience that no one cares about". Your statements show clear bias with no evidence to support it. You're certainly entitled to your opinions, but the sweeping statements you are making are simply wrong.
First off, you are getting the wrong impression about me. I'm a Windows user. I have some Apple products, like an iPhone, but I tried using Mac OSX for a year and hated it. I have a MacBook Pro at work, but I bootcamped it and run Windows 7 solely. I've been a Microsoft user since MS-DOS 3.3, so I don't care what OSX's install numbers are. I started my career programming for Windows 3.1 SDK, using MFC, etc, so I've been with Microsoft every step of the way.
Windows 7 was a great OS after a disastrous Windows Vista. Windows 8 is again an unmitigated disaster. 88M users out of 1 billion install base?
No one wants to upgrade to Windows 8. That's why they are backing away from their Metro strategy. Yet another integration attempt that has completely blown up in their face.
You are also wrong about Bing's search traffic. It's 18%. As I said, largely ignored. 4 out of 5 people ignore Bing. Bundling Yahoo as disingenuous since most people don't know it's Bing. I worked at Yahoo. I know how inertia works, and given that their search share hasn't changed much since they had their own search engine, it's being used by people that just don't care. You could switch Yahoo's backend to Google and no one would know the difference, because they don't care.
Sure, Windows Phone may be a small success in Latin America, if you consider selling dirt cheap phones with no margin a success. It's still the #2 phone to Android and Windows Phone is still 3-6% marketshare worldwide. 94 people in the world out of 100 ignore Windows Phone. It's absolutely ignored. That may change in the future, if Microsoft gives away their phones for free. But as of right now, they are absolutely ignored.
Microsoft is unable to create a single experience on any of their platforms that bring happiness to their users, except for X-box. I don't have an X-box one, but many of my coworkers are complaining like hell about Microsoft's need to change the X-box one's experience to more like Metro's. I can't speak to how accurate this statement is. If they were smart, they would be battling PS4 and trying to make the best gaming console they can, instead of having another agenda of some failed integration that is unnecessary.
And I'm an avid Mac user. My primary machine is a Retina Macbook Pro. I just converted my wife from yet another Thinkpad, which fell apart after two years, to a Macbook Air. I've got my whole house connected via an Airport Extreme and a couple Airports used as access points. I have my Apple TV as the HDMI IN source on my Xbox One. The only time I open Parallels is for Visual Studio or the occasional PC only game.
I was an early adopter of Android tablets. I bought the Xoom when it first came out, and then the Asus Transformer as soon as it was available. I have bought and returned three iPads (iPad 2, 4 and mini retina) because of just how limited the OS actually is. The hardware was beautiful, but I still can't do simple things like create a separate account for my kids to use? Now I own two Surface tablets (Pro and RT) because I find the experience to be simply better than iOS and Android. The other platforms have a lot more apps available, but the Windows store has what I want.
I now also own Windows Phones across the family because I was tired of the fragmentation issues on Android. I was also tired of having to flash the ROM every few months because performance and battery life got worse and worse over time.
You will probably find similar stories if you just look at the people using Windows Phones and Windows 8 (on touch devices). Pretty much all user reviews I have read on the systems are incredibly positive and it is only getting better.
Edit: Yes, there are hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users not upgrading to Windows 8. I think that's to be expected as Windows 8 is best experienced on a touch device, not with a keyboard and mouse. If you look at all of the new devices running Windows 8, they pretty much all have a touchscreen (tablet, laptop or convertible). I have used a laptop exclusively for the last five years now. The only time I ever touch a mouse is to play first person shooters. I believe Microsoft sees that there are fewer and fewer new dedicated desktop setups, and it makes more sense to build your operating system towards where the market is going than to where it was. For once they are trying to be ahead of the curve, and we will have to see if it pays off in the long run.
If OSX were coasting on a worldwide monopoly, where simply executing competently yielded hundreds of millions of automatic sales, you would actually have a point.
Microsoft is not a startup. They were on top of the world, and they've only been going down.
As to "fasted growing mobile OS", it's easy to achieve that when you have low single digit marketshare. For anyone else who read that and were surprised, note that Microsoft went from 2 to 4% marketshare. Android went from 75 to 81 (3x more absolute market growth, but from a relative perspective, no Android couldn't grow from 75% to 150%). It is the sort of skewed and misrepresented statistics that make the whole debate so odd.
I personally don't believe that they are worse experiences. The Windows Phone UI is loved by pretty much everyone who uses it. It's a similar story with Windows 8. Read reviews from people who are actually using the operating system and not just reacting out of fear of change.
One of Microsoft's strengths is how diverse their portfolio is. Adding to that the fact that Microsoft products are working together now better than they ever have before. Breaking the company apart is simply ridiculous.