Everyone is derivating from Metro UI now. I can't complain, I quite like the look. Funny that Microsoft, in this day an age would be such a trend setter!

Microsoft are making all the right moves recently. I think they're going to really make a resurgence with Nadella at the wheel!

Yes, and it seems Apple is slowly becoming the pre-2013 Microsoft. Funny times!

If you've been around long enough you would probably say - normal times. It's fun here in the tech tumble dryer.

Wonder if you could elaborate more on this for someone not a hardcore techie

Sure. The things I've noticed since Nadella took over from Ballmer:

* They're obviously putting a lot of effort into listening to their customers and implementing their feedback (see windows 8.2 changes, start bar is coming back, metro apps will now be windowed) (also see this article by Gabe at Penny arcade about how Microsoft implemented his feedback for the Surface Pro 3 http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/16/surface-pro...).

* They realise the cloud is the future and they're making great strides towards making sure Azure is the best cloud platform available. I've used Amazon's AWS, Rackspace and Azure. Azure is hands down the best. Nadella was formerly in charge of Azure, so it's no surprise that Azure is coming to the forefront of Microsoft. The interface for their new cloud control panel is excellent (http://portal.azure.com https://i.imgur.com/SxdPZjf.png).

* Developers, developers, developers is back in season! They're open sourcing everything. ASP.NET, MVC, their new C# compiler are all now open source. The UI library they used to make the website above is open source (WinJS https://github.com/winjs/winjs). They are making obvious efforts to engage the developer community.

* Whilst everybody else is scrambling to create walled gardens and closed platforms, Microsoft is going in the opposite direction. All of their recent open source releases have been on Github, not Codeplex. You can provision linux virtual machines, mysql database, redis caches on azure - as well as the Microsoft equivalents. They just announced they're making an Android handset after acquiring Nokia, as well as Windows Phone. They've announced that they will start supporting officially supporting Mono (open source version of their .NET clr) with new releases of ASP.NET, allowing ASP.NET applications to run on open source platforms.

* Their share price is the highest it's been in 15 years

EDIT:

* And as much as I hate to admit it (I haven't personally switched browsers or search providers yet...) but they're actually fixing the problems with Bing and Internet Explorer, and seem to be rapidly catching up with the pack. The new developer tools for IE actually look pretty good (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ie/bg182326.aspx) and Bing is not looking too shabby either.

Especially their design page: http://www.google.com/design

"[Google Manager]: Guys... Could you make it modern, like Microsoft Metro, but maybe decrease the padding between tiles and maybe add some blurry shadows."

"[Designers]: but shadows are a violation flat design principles!"

"[Google Manager]: I am sorry, but we cannot come across like complete rip-offs".

We need 7 red lines. All orthogonal, two with green ink and the rest with transparent ink.

Well here's the problem, you're using a blue pen.

And can one of the lines be in the shape of a kitten?

It's not flat design at all. They spent like 3/4 of the design segment in the keynote talking about how everything has a depth, and how things cast shadows on each other.

Have we reached a point where anyone using color is ripping off windows? :/

Metro isn't flat either. There's a Z axis and objects get pushed back when you tap on them.

They took the shapes and layout of Metro and the color palette of iOS7/8

Everything after Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos has been shameless "me too".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zz1SwCTCEE

Not really. My point is that Google has never had any design vision with android and simply responds to the movements of the other big names in the phone business with their "me too" offering. It's hard to deny this fact. It's also interesting how the same exact sentiment elsewhere in this thread gets upvoted.

You probably got down-voted because you didn't offer any examples. You could swap Apple for Google in your sentence and it would carry just as much weight.

I was replying TO THE EXAMPLE. What is wrong with some of you people?

No it wouldn't, what a ridiculous thing to say. The iPhone came out of nowhere and was a revelation, Android was a hastily (very well) assembled clone.

Were you not around when they came out?

Yes, I was there when apple stole the idea of a touch screen phone from Nokia and Palm, what's your point?

I don't want to get involved in this flame war, but Apple began development of the Newton (a mobile device with a touch screen) in 1987. Palm wasn't even founded until 1992.

You still haven't offered any examples.

> looks like Windows Metro?

Superficially yes but it's really just a new coat of paint on top of a slightly revised UI. My eyes instantly glaze over looking at these screenshots because we have this boring font combined with a boring use of whitespace with little variation in text size. It's all the bad parts of Metro / Modern UI without any of the good parts.

And everything has a big picture of something smaller in the foreground behind it.

It's not just you, it definitely reminded me of Metro and Codrops demos.

I feel iOS 7 was a mix of Metro and Holo. And Material/Paper is now a mix of iOS7 and Holo.