Comment 49 for bug 882274

As a point of reference, Windows 8's Metro user interface is going to provide a "Windows Classic" workspace for backwards compatibility. This is an area that Microsoft has consistently gotten right over the years, and thus helped them maintain their position in the market. Even when they make advances, they always retain a layer of backwards compatibility to avoid disparaging their existing customers (and thus losing them).

Taking this lesson to heart (I believe) would greatly improve the growing tension that Canonical's go-it-alone mindset is generating in the community. Thus, the simple and obvious solution to the "Unity problem" (and most of these NIH design decisions) is to retain a backwards-compatible layer (e.g. GNOME interface in a Unity workspace). So, anyway, if you don't want to risk losing more-and-more users and positive mind-share about Ubuntu, you're going to have accept the reality that backwards-compatibility needs to be a key tenant of your community involvement and design approach.