I thought this was going to be about gaming before I read it. Retro designs have become de rigeur in gaming over the last couple of years and it's boosting innovation by making it possible for indie developers to compete on a more level playing field against the big studios (e.g. MineCraft).

This article demonstrates how it's almost the opposite for non-game interfaces. Instead, it's the plucky upstarts that can take the risk on novel interfaces since they don't have large numbers of users to annoy (and I bet if Google tried to get radical with Calendar now, there'd be a real storm of hate over it).