Why would Microsoft remove the beautiful Aero Glass effect and replace it with flat colors and cheesy translucency?

Just an assumption, Sinofsky and a few morons next to him just removed it, anther assumption someone lost a bet, or medicinal marihuana, or just for fun, or maybe for pure stupidity.

I am unable to think of more logical reasons.

Natural look is dated?  No, the natural look is reality.  The flat look, with no depth or shadows or translucency is like... 1990's, Windows 95, 16-color dated.  That's how windows 8 looks to me.

The Aero Glass theme is the most modern, most beautiful theme I've ever seen on any OS ever.  Even the wild KDE Desktop themes and effects are cheesy compared to Aero Glass.  Glass looked sophisticated compared to the others, especially with the parallax of the glare effects when moving windows.

I'm a developer, and I've designed game engines.  I know all about performance.  Switching to a pre-rendered desktop (a.k.a. desktop composition) was a very smart and long-awaited move (Apple had it for a decade prior, based on my experience viewing their smooth window animation when I was in Jr. High (I'm almost 30 now).  This composition including the glass blend shader effects can easily be offloaded to the GPU, so this imaginary performance hit is ridiculous.  If there were inefficiencies, they could have been improved.  Finally, there was no reason to not make it available.  There is no reason the start screen couldn't have been a giant full-screen glass panel.

The Windows 8 start menu was old-news to me, considering I invented it back in 2003 when I was still an undergrad.  In my graduate work, I formalized the design with "scenario-based design" methodology and presented it to my class, as well as to Lockheed Martin in 2007 (who incidentally wanted to patent it, but I wouldn't let them, explaining that I had already shown it to many people and wanted it to be free).  It came complete with a full-screen display of icons (based on what was in your quicklaunch folder) that could be expanded in width to display additional information about each shortcut.  I used the F8 key with a global hook to activate it (since I couldn't hook the Windows key in Win XP), and to start a search, all you had to do was start typing.  After each letter typed, it would refilter the matching icons, by looking for the letter sequence anywhere with the shortcut name, filename, or shortcut description, so that typing "IM" would match "AIM" as well as "GIMP".  After each re-filtering, the non-matching icons would smoothly fade out in place, and the remaining icons would smoothly animate to regroup, in order, in the center of the display.  I have this all documented and graded long before Windows Vista even arrived, and even presented it at Lockheed Martin in 2007 as I said.  So as far as I'm concerned, Windows 8's start screen is nice, but it actually botches the idea I came up with long before.  If you read my scenario-based design specification (a formal specification from Authors at PSU which I adopted for my design), it details exactly why every aspect of this full-screen tile system with morphing "live" icons is most efficient, as well as more suitable for a touch display.  But again, Windows 8 got the details wrong, so it's not that great or usable.  For example, in my system, the icons remained in the same places so that your spacial memory could allow you to quickly touch the same spot every time at a given resolution.  It supported scrolling as well as page up/down, so you could skip pages and still touch in the same spot from memory.  Anyway, I'm glad they at least moved in that (obvious) direction, but I've demonstrated and reasoned that it could be done much better.  Nice try.

Bottom line, removing a feature does not count as a performance improvement.  How about removing the entire OS, that would free up a lot of processor cycles!  No.  The Glass effect was important.  The blurring was functional and aesthetically pleasing and calming.  I have zero interest in Windows 8 at this point.

Same here, I don't really like the new theme that much of windows 8, the glass aero theme in vista/7 was good I have no idea why the removed it. Couldn't they have just put both themes?

Utter idiocy to make PC users give up Aero glass just to try and make Tablet users feel better about the ugly stuff they have to use.

I bought a PC for, Christ's sake,  I don't want a Tablet experience.  If I wanted a tablet experience I would have bought a F-ing Tablet instead of buying a brand new expensive PC.

Hi all, 

The Aero Glass add a rich look and feel to Windows OS and in my perspective, only a MAD person would remove such a beauty. Aero Glass made Windows 7 to gain market and Micorosoft should be insane to ditch it. 

If Aero Glass is very resource hungry, then provide both the Aero Glass and Metro theme, the user can choose which to use based on the system's config.

If Microsoft wants to get profits and improve it's position, then the only way to attain that is to satisfy it's customers, and the customers wants AERO GLASS back..

Bring AERO GLASS back.. Bring AERO GLASS back...

Listen to your customers and provide a rich UI for the upcoming Windows OS... if Windows Blue does not have an UI similar to Aero Glass or better than that, then it is a sign that Microsoft has stopped listening to is customers and all the effort that the employees of Microsoft had put in the new OS will be in vain..

WE DO NOT WANT A 2D INTERFACE....