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Microsoft Won't Bring Back the Start Menu Until 2015
DroidJason1 (3589319) writes "Microsoft recently announced plans to reintroduce the Start Menu to Windows in an upcoming version of the operating system. While the plan was to roll out an update to Windows 8.1 and offer the Start menu later this year, it seems like this is no longer the case. Now Microsoft is reportedly looking to release the Start Menu with Windows 9, which is expected in April of 2015. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have faced a boat load of criticism and hatred, partly due to the removal of the Start button and Start menu. The restoration of a visible Start button on the taskbar was one of the key features of the Windows 8.1 update, released back in October of 2013."
to "latest and greatest" version of Windows in 2014 either.
MS may as well start selling retail copies of Win 7 again
Wow, force adoption of an un-popular version of your software by crippling the other versions.
Brilliant strategy! What could possibly go wrong? Just piss off everybody, and then they won't be pissed off about Windows 8.
You, sir, have a brilliant future in PR ahead of you.
What next, brick all of the XBox 360s so people have to buy an XBone?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For reasons known only to them, they wanted phones, tablets, notebooks and desktops to all use the same interface. Since a start menu doesn't work well on a phone, they opted to remove it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It was to push Modern UI (nee Metro) onto every platform to try to bootstrap app development for their floundering mobile offerings and to try to capture the application revenue that Apple and Google were achieving through their walled garden app stores.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Besides all the shiny marketing, they are admittedly designed with usability in mind,
I used to believe this load of bullshit about Mac usability, until I got one. I've been using a Macbook Pro for 6 months now as my primary machine, and I still hate it. Usability my ass... just TRY connecting the damn thing to a projector or second display in a conference room and making it behave in a rational manner. Or try taking a screenshot... what was that obnoxious key combo again? That's right... it makes no sense and can't be remembered by a mere mortal. Let's jump to the beginning of a line with the Home key, or the end of the line with the End key... oh wait, it doesn't have one. They conveniently replaced those with more key combinations that can't be remembered by us mortals. Apparently text entry isn't an important usability case for Apple.
Any time I want to get real work done, I plug in a Windows keyboard and switch over to a Windows VM. Why? Not because I love Microsoft software and Windows so much, it's because it "just fucking works" unlike everything on the Mac.
> "The restoration of a visible Start button on the taskbar was one of the key features of the Windows 8.1 update, released back in October of 2013."
Apparently this needs to be pointed out yet again: A button that takes you to the start screen is not a start button. What users requested was the start menu back. What was delivered was at best a condescending "we know what you really want better than you", and more like a calculated insult.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
But we have invested years learning those habits. Productivity kicks in when the tool becomes a reflex. Reflexes are not a bad thing: they speed us up because we don't have stop and think.
I have nothing against the octopus body design, but there is a big learning curve for a brain used to a human body to suddenly be shoved into an octopus body.
Unless the "new thing" offers about a 20% productivity improvement, it's generally best to stick with the existing interface because the learning curve will eat up that 20% for a few years. In biz investment terms, the ROI is too far out. Why can't MS just give us both interface choices as a user setting?
Change for changes' sake is a productivity drain. (There is a reason I kick kids off my lawn :-)
Table-ized A.I.
I partly agree. Windows 8.1 isn't as tragic as it seems at first. But they've forgotten one of the primary goals of a UI: discoverability.
I'm a Linux geek, so I'm used to typing arcane commands into shell prompts. I can find whatever I need in a Google search if I don't know it already. Command line interfaces require you to specify what you are looking for. It's expected that you should know in advance what you want and how to ask for it. This is somewhat less true for the double-tab interface in bash, but still, the basic idea is to specify.
What made Windows and MacOS such a big deal back in the day is that they were "discoverable" - you could figure out what options you had available by reading the menus and picking one, with the basic expectation that, if there was an option or command to run, there'd be a menu entry in a hopefully sensible place to allow it. Thus, anybody could "use" a computer by finding the obvious start button.
Windows 8.x tosses discoverability to the wind. You just have to know in advance which combination of swipes and from which side in order to get what you want. Because of this, it's not discoverable. What makes Windows 8 so damning and frustrating for the new user is that stuff happens and there's no obvious reason why.
With this recent statement, Microsoft has made clear that they're going to try to double down on the Metro Interface, and hope that by promising it at some distant, future date, the haters will shut up long enough for people to get used to the not-discoverable Windows 8 interface.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Microsoft has been on a long-term trend in the name of ease of use of burying everything behind complicated and convoluted UIs since at least Vista, although the default XP UI was also in on it a little.
Little things, like changing your computer's IP address seem to require more and more clicks, dialog boxes and window changes to accomplish the same tasks as before. More and more settings seem to default to "idiot light' mode where basic information is deliberately turned off or hidden.
This might be tolerable for a "home" edition of something designed to get grandma on the internet with a minimum of long distance phone calls to her grandkids, but it's absolutely maddening for "professional" editions and simply uncalled for in "server" editions.
I just cannot fathom what group or individual decided that Server 2012 needed the same UI as the most basic desktop OS. I don't mind the concept of Metro and the execution seems OK on a Surface Pro provided you stay in Metro mode, but there should be a switch or something that just completely disabled Metro mode for server OSes (and should be the default) and it should be switchable for desktop OSes.
Further, the desktop UI needs an "expert" mode where some of the "wizards" are disabled (can't I just have my network connections without the network and sharing center) and more details and technical information are presented to the end users without being filtered/turned off.
I completely agree. OSX has a poor user interface. Their "Save screen real estate by only having one pull down menu" made sense when we were running on 320x200 screens. At that resolution, a pull down menu took a significant percentage of the screen real estate, and everyone was using a single screen. Today, screen real estate is abundant, and multiple monitors are common. With the single menu, there is no good visual cue to indicate which of your many open windows the pull down menu will affect. This is a poor UI giving poor usability. Putting removable media in the trash is the movement for ejecting the media? Total brain dead UI.