As a longtime Apple
product fanslave I've got to say, something like this would be welcome competition. Apple's obsession with sickly-sweet sentimentality (seriously, who uses FaceTime with any regularity?) grates on the nerves. A cold sci-fi revamp is exactly what I'm expecting from Microsoft in the next few years.
It's obviously started to dominate their product line and is slowly permeating their flagship UI. The dubsteppiness of the Surface commercial wasn't an accident. It will take a long while before the company has earned itself a rebrand, because a rebrand without actual, significant and, here's the kicker, successful change to its entire product line (including Windows, that poor magnificent demented bastard of an OS) is an empty gesture and deserving of contempt and mockery.
Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle with itself, but it has one advantage on its side: technology rapidly changes and improves, and it's only accelerating. As long as the company doesn't fall too far behind, the shifting landscape of mobile platforms, touch surfaces and desktop v. small screen conventions will be a perfect excuse to retire its failed products entirely, rather than endlessly iterating and mutating them beyond reason.
If they can scrape by long enough to let the features rot fully and throw the garbage out the window, and finally shine some sunlight on their promising new seeds, they will be able to justify a new brand.
Til then, moar dubstep.