It was ridiculed because it wasn't cool. Microsoft made lots of things that people wanted to use. Nobody wants to spend $100 on some software without some clear benefit from it, and almost nobody who knows what their software needs are needs a product like this.
That confines this product to the aisle of "things you would never buy for yourself."
It's a classic UI dilemma: how do you simplify an interface without removing the functionality that makes the product powerful? However you'd answer that, what you don't do is bury that functionality behind a bunch of obscure analogies that have nothing to do with how that functionality works. The presence of a couch on that screen does nothing to help the user do anything that they need a computer to do, for example.
That confines this product to the aisle of "things you would never buy for yourself."
It's a classic UI dilemma: how do you simplify an interface without removing the functionality that makes the product powerful? However you'd answer that, what you don't do is bury that functionality behind a bunch of obscure analogies that have nothing to do with how that functionality works. The presence of a couch on that screen does nothing to help the user do anything that they need a computer to do, for example.