I don't think GNOME's radical redirection was necessarily a product of threats from Microsoft. This is me reaching back into the old memory bank. I remember a justification for GNOME 3's design was to be touch friendly. I don't think that is necessarily a Microsoft fault. Touch screens were coming to laptops and at the time it felt like every hardware maker was throwing touch screens on laptops. And well, it turned out not to pan out very well for anyone. Here we are and yes, some people may buy laptops with touch screen, but I have yet to run into someone who owns one and uses the touch screen. The exception would something like the Microsoft surfaces.