I don’t know how you think live tiles worked but they showed you information from an application without launching the application. You just open the start menu and you’d see all the current info from those applications at a glance, whether they were running or not, no clicking required.
They took up 10x more space than they need to. And we had the information thing way, way before.
I can see the weather on my taskbar right now in KDE, no app launch required. Except it's not a giant 1 inch by 1 inch square plastered on my start menu. It's a little text showing me a cloud and temperature.
Also, live tiles just did not work a lot of the time. Most of the time, when you looked at them, it would just show the icon surrounded by a sea of color, like a little island. I'm assuming because the daemon is either not running or has ridiculously slow start up time, whereas the start menu might only be open for fractions of a second.
