I think they saw Apple’s success with the iOS App Store, saw Apple trying to do the same on desktop and tried to leap ahead of them by forcing the pace. Of course when app stores on desktop, for both Apple and Microsoft, proved much more problematic to implement, ramming it through like that proved highly damaging.
It's funny because even if you put yourself in the mind of 2009, you can imagine a much more modest store feature doing good things for end users.
The old Windows desktop might have had a half dozen things prompting you to elevate and update. Flash player, Adobe reader, Java runtime, all these things wanted your undivided attention to update, not to mention were polling the network and using resources to do that. So maybe you could see a single piece of infrastructure allowing those third parties to hook in less intrusively.
But that's not what they asked for. They would prefer you trash your app and write for the thing they came up with this year, to be thrown away when they do the rewrite the next year.
> They would prefer you trash your app and write for the thing they came up with this year, to be thrown away when they do the rewrite the next year.
That hasn't been true for over a year now. Classic Win32 desktop apps have been in the Store for over a year now (nearly a year and a half). It's my preferred way now to install things like Office and Paint.NET. Even Photoshop is in the Store now.
(Even iTunes was promised at one point, and I'm still very hopeful for that, because Apple's Windows Updater is still one of the worst updaters on Windows, where bad updaters was once an art form.)
