Comment by scyzoryk_xyz

He was selling. The audience were sales. OS's were fully matured at that point. Computers were something you buy at a store. It was a selling point.

A decade later they were handling the windfall that came with smartphone ascendancy. An emergence of an entirely new design language for touch screen UI. Skeumorphism was slowing that all down.

Making it all flat meant making it consistent, which meant making it stable, which meant scalability. iOS7 made it so that even random developers' apps could play along and they needed a lot of developers playing along.