Comment by mr_toad

I read somewhere that the visual design of Windows 8 was based on the works of Mondrian, because they wanted a design that didn’t just look like the Swiss School that Apple had adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl

I don’t know if the idea of calling Windows 8 modern stemmed from that, or if they decided to pick Mondrian having already decided to go with modern.