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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
Why would anyone want to start anything on Windows 8?
Microsoft seems to be intentionally upholding the old meme about 'every other OS released by Microsoft sucking'.
After a while, you really have to wonder why they keep doing this.
I received a windows 8 machine at work to fix some compatibility issues with my product. I bitched and moaned about how awful it was for a month. Then i let out a stream of periodic muffled profanities every time some weird unrequested interface took over my laptop from out of nowhere. Then months went by and i realized something:
Windows 8 is not really that bad. I know how to find all the stuffs now. I know how to shut it down. I know how to avoid having intrusive metro apps popping up. I no longer care if the start menu comes back or not. It's all still there. It actually seems to perform quite well. start up and shutdown times are decent. sleep when i close the lid seems to work. I'm through bitching and i just want to get on with my work. At this point, i'd rather it just stay the way it is.
"Microsoft will not have a new desktop-appropriate operating system until 2015." Fixed that for you.
I'm not sure why they're doing this -- third party developers have proven it's easy to do.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Who needs the most used button anyways?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
One thing about Microsoft that I don't understand is its seeming slowness at doing simple things. OK, everyone agrees there has to be a Start Menu, it is not hard to implement (see lots of 3rd party apps doing just that), it will not break any existing Windows functionality, MS has virtually unlimited highly skilled resources, yet this obvious simple improvement takes months (if not years) to release. Let alone the fact that this problem should never have existed in the first place.
Windows 2000 is crap? It's one of the golden releases, in my opinion the best one after 7.
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?"
And I can't do it without Classic Shell. Classic Shell, making Windows 8 Bearable.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Also, only the even Star Trek is good. Fuck it, this analogy is collapsing faster than a... something something.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
It's not at all bad once you install Classic Shell and disable Metro. It's still totally insane that we need to install a 3rd party tool to make the OS usable, but 8 is far superior to 7 once you install Classic Shell.
> "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 had an epiphany. That epiphany was called iTunes and later spun off as the App Store. You see Apple gets a cut of EVERY APP SOLD via their marketplace and I believe they might even share in revenue from ads in ad supported apps as well. Since it is impossible to sideload apps without jailbreaking an iOS device they have ISV's over a barrel if they want to sell to Apple's customers. Microsoft decided they liked Steve Job's decidedly Gatesesque business model. They knew their mobile devices would be a hard sell given the saturation of iOS/Android so they decided they could back door their model into their desktop OS. It has been a multi-tiered approach but non of their vectors has gotten much traction. Surface RT was DOA and Surface Pro and desktop users continue to use traditional Windows apps. If Microsoft brings the start menu back it would delay even further Metro App adoption and Microsoft's newest revenue stream. So they will continue to promise to bring it back so people won't just throw Windows 7 on their new PC but keep delaying it as long as they can in hopes Metro App use continues to climb.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
Windows has jumped the shark. It's all downhill from here.
Many folks have finally tired of Microsoft just churning the interface just to make a new product. All that did was alienate the users that had grown accustomed to menu interfaces in Office and the Start menu. Paying to buy a whole new version of the OS and then dealing with the headaches of just trying to figure out how to just get back to the capability the user had before the change got really old.
The problems with Windows 8 are not necessarily with the features. Windows 8 may be the best OS under the sun, but most users won't ever know that because it is buried under one of the most craptastic PC user interfaces contrived. Folks probably would be happy to have the core features of Windows 8 if the menus and buttons looked familiar to the last version. They do not.
I finally went to Linux simply because they kept a lot of the UI features like menus and start buttons that Windows abandoned. Linux really is now at a point where it is an easier OS to transition to from Windows XP and 7 vs transitioning to Windows 8. That is not because Linux interfaces improved dramatically (though they are better than they were) but because Windows 8 broke a lot of UI features that the users really liked and wanted.
Happy trails Microsoft, best wishes from a formerly happy customer from the Windows 3.1 days. Friendly advice - stop pissing off your loyal customers and give them what they want to see.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The ribbon gui in msoffice drove many people to switch to LibreOffice.
Given the proportion in market share between Open/LibreOffice and MS Office, by "many" you mean something like 0.1%?
LibreOffice didn't exist before the stupid ribbon gui was launched. Today million users use LibreOffice instead of propriety msoffice, more like 10-20% market share. And most of the people still forced to use msoffice hate the ribbon gui. Still HATE it.
The missing start menu drove many people to switch to Linux.
See above.
(in practice, most people who don't like the new Win8 UI just stay on Win7)
Windows8 is preinstalled to a larger degree than msoffice is. Ordinary people cannot be bothered to reinstall windows7.
The destruction of win32 (a good API in it's time) drove many developers to switch to Linux/posix.
What destruction? You can still take a program written against Win32 API as it was in NT 3.1, recompile it, and it'll run on Win8. Heck, you don't even have to recompile if the architecture matches.
win64 was a lost opportunity to fix win32 and make it good, instead we got "win32 for 64-bit windows", which is stupid and wrong. MS got cold feet, marketed other technologies as .net instead of making win32 the best system api. Now 64-bit posix is a much better choice. Because 64-bit is on every system today, embedded, mobile, desktop, servers. Having a 32-bit api when using 64-bit hardware sucks.