Microsoft: Start Menu Returns, Windows Free For Small Device OEMs, Cortana Beta

At Microsoft's BUILD conference today, the company announced that the Start Menu will officially be returning to Windows 8.1. It will combine the Windows 7 Start Menu with a handful of Metro-style tiles. They're also making it so Windows 8 apps can run in windows using the normal desktop environment. In addition to the desktop announcements, Microsoft also talked about big changes for Windows on mobile devices and Internet-of-Things devices. The company will be giving Windows away for free to OEMs making phones and tablets (9" screens and smaller), and for IoT devices that can run it. Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri.

Comments

Gee, so only a year of screaming

[msobkow]

So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen. Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[rikkards]

It's because they can't use their usual solution which is "you need to upgrade to the next version"

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MightyMartian]

A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[TheGratefulNet]

OT: I finally found your moped jesus:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

now that that mystery is solved, all the rest look comparatively simple.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[mwvdlee]

"Product X is great, you just have to replace it's main features with additional products Y and Z".

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Jane Q. Public]

"A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas."

Even so, they've taken this dubious fall-back position: "Okay, we admit that it sucks and that nobody likes it, so we're going back to the old way. But we're going to keep pushing the obviously failed 'new' way at you anyway."

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

But wait! I guess it did accomplish something. It got others in the industry to also adopt eye-burning flat toolbars and icons, containing little pictograms that the brain associates with nothing in particular.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is actually really damn competent at making windows run well. Even since 7 they've made a whole lot of under the hood improvements. Kernel, memory management, better support for modern hardware. SSD optimizations. Graphics system improvements.

It's like Vista. Vista introduced a massive amount of improvements particularly when it came to enterprise management.. But they fucked up hard on on the end use experience. Badly tuned. Ran like shit compared to XP. They fixed it up and released 7. (It really does run like shit. Install fully patched 7 and Vista on the same hardware and you'll be shocked with how much better 7 is)

With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

This is horrible news. It just might save Windows.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Looking back, you can actually see a timeline of their PR bullshit.

1. "Here, the new Metro! It's shiny and cool, and you'll be so much more productive!"
2. "The new Metro is great! Really, it is! If for some odd reason you don't instantly fall in love with it, it only means that you haven't tried it!"
3. "Metro is good! And the only people who don't like it yet are those that didn't give it a chance and try it for a while."
4. "Metro is really useful, trust us! You just need to give it a try and use it for a while and get used to it. Honestly, once you're used to it you'll wonder how you could live without it."
5. "Ok, for the time being you can switch back to old style, but you'll see that you'll do it less and less frequently and you'll eventually embrace Metro, most applications will only be useful in Metro anyway!"
6. "Well, it seems that at least for now we have to allow using "old style" for more apps, because there are still those luddites that can't accept change. But you WILL find Metro useful at some point in the future, maybe the time isn't right yet!"
7. "Ok, ok... the world is not ready yet for Metro it seems."

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

Well the traditional Windows 7 UI is a royal pain in the ass to use on touchscreen devices so you need an interface more tailored to touchscreens which the modern UI is good at. Their only issue was making it the default on desktops.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Satya is the right guy. He's an engineer, not a salesman. He knows how things actually work, and not just inside the little (in modern realities) Microsoft bubble.

(case in point: he knows what node.js is - not as a buzzword, but the actual tech details)

There's one more thing. Not many people seem to have been paying attention to what other changes there have been under Satya, but one noticeable change is the skyrocketing rise of Scott Guthrie. Why this matters? Well, Scott is the guy who, for the last 7 years or so, has been heavily pushing for F/OSS inside Microsoft. In particular, open sourcing ASP.NET MVC was his testbed project, and all the other .NET bits that went F/OSS after that were also under his guidance. Oh, and jQuery.

And now this guy is being rapidly promoted - first stepping in to take Satya's place as the latter goes CEO, then becoming an executive VP of Cloud+Enterprise. Now this is the division that's basically responsible for the entire MS server-side stack - SQL, Exchange, Azure etc - but also all the developer tools. I'll let you draw the conclusions from that.

Oh, and one other telling thing was the recent renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, with the justification of "we do more than just Windows there, and don't want Linux users to feel unwelcome". This sort of casual dismissal of the Windows brand was unthinkable mere months ago.

April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft listens to end users?!

Digital Assistant software

[slapout]

"Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri."

As opposed to Clippy, their digital assistant software that's similar to Jar Jar Binks.

What about 2012R2???

[fullmetal55]

PLEASE PLEASE TAKE THE DAMN TILE INTERFACE AWAY FROM YOUR SERVER OS!!!!

It's useless! it's painful! I curse myself whenever I hit the start button!

Re:"Free" Windows

[dougmc]

Windows on a phone works pretty well -- I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40 and why not, and it's actually quite decent.

The tiles based interface works quite well for a small device like that. I certainly don't like it on a PC with a big screen (or two), but for a little screen it works quite well.

In fact, the only real problem I had with the OS is that there aren't many apps available compared to iOS and Android.

So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all us fools who installed server 2012, and can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying another 1400 bucks? Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[QuasiEvil]

Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.

Re:"Free" Windows

[CastrTroy]

Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device. It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in. Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop. You wouldn't need any cloud services like drop box because you could literally bring your whole desktop computer with you wherever you go. This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.