With Sinofsky gone and Start8 selling well, will MS add the start menu back? | Hacker News Reader

With Sinofsky gone and Start8 selling well, will MS add the start menu back?

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17 pointsBreakthrough77 comments

In what way does merging the desktop and touch experience in one support ANYONE? Why did they (and some Linux desktops as well) try that at all?

Two different types of devices with two different input paradigms. Why merge them? Why not optimize them for each separate paradigm?

It is much better for everyone, and friendlier to the user, to give them the best, perfect, interface, for the device they are using. Even if that device is a desktop computer.

I use Windows 8 on my desktop without a touchscreen. I find it much more enjoyable to use than Windows 7 or my Mac.

Yeah I like it, you just have to get used to going to the corners. Admittedly, corners are a problem on VMs.

Or use the keyboard instead. Win+c opens the side panel you'd get when going into the top/bottom right corner.

Merging them makes you think of tablets as computers and not entertainment screens. It's a power play.

You don't see a benefit to having a unified experience between Laptop, Tablet and Phone? And Xbox?

By standardising the interface, you standardise the environment and interactions for apps. Metro apps for a Win 8 phone will also run on Win 8 tablets and laptops.

I think its a pretty brave decision from Microsoft, and it may well pay off massively.

It's a horribly bad decision. Why would you need a unified experience between devices with vastly different interaction and input scenarios? Desktops make up 80% of user interaction, but Microsoft is focusing on the 20% who use mobile or tablet. A small handheld device which is used primarily for content consumption would be best served with a Win 8 style UI, but for the desktop, it makes working much more difficult - people work at desktop PCs in a vastly different way.

I've been using Win 8 on the desktop for almost a year, and I have no need for a start button/menu/etc. The Metro (er, Modern UI) paradigm works as well with a mouse as it does with touch. The days of touchless screens are coming to an end; in the near future most laptops and desktop monitors will all be touch-ready. I find most of the FUD about the new paradigm is coming from people who haven't even used it. Use it for a month; you'll find it gets out of your way and lets you work just fine.

No it will not pay off, do you want Ferrari's to have a crappy engine to deliver a unified experience between city cars and race cars?

No you don't. And for user interfaces it's the same.

A desktop computer provides a lot more space than a mobile device, so just because mobile devices exist, is no reason to suddenly make a design meant for small screens on the big screen with comfortable input devices.

To draw on your Ferrari analogy: Ferrari market to a tiny percentage of the car driving consumers as a whole. So of course that would make no sense. Also, Ferrari drivers don't tend to also drive Minis, so why have a unified experience.

PC-users and Tablet-users and Phone-users are all huge, mainstream, overlapping markets. I can see there might be some trade offs and problems with unifying experience - which is why I said this is a brave move by Microsoft. But you're basically bringing up one of the trade offs (screen size) and using that to write off the whole initiative.

This "we'll control the whole ecosystem by standardizing the interface!" scheme honestly sounds about as ridiculous to me as "it's a 5 billion dollar market, so if we take just 1% of it, we'll be rich!" It doesn't take a genius to understand that there are significant differences in interacting with a computer by touching a tiny screen held up to one's face, touching a larger screen held slightly farther away, pointing a mouse around and typing on a keyboard, and selecting menu items with a d-pad while looking at a screen that is several feet away.

If you deliberately try to use the same interface across each of those interfaces, you're just going to get an unusable mess. It's amazing that some of the same people that understand the idea that "you need a responsive design for your website because no one wants to hunt for 32x32 pixel buttons on a phone" can completely miss that concept when it's applied to anything that doesn't have a touch screen.

Sharing technology and development tools between the platforms makes sense. Tying the tablet and phone experiences closely together makes sense. Adopting a similar visual style across the platforms makes sense. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!"

Desktops are inherently oriented towards small items on high resolution displays. If you make menu items too large, both reduce the amount of stuff you can fit on the screen at once and increase the travel the user has to make to select them. More importantly, desktops are inherently oriented towards multitasking, and hiding the entire screen just to open a program is inherently hostile towards that.

I'm usually the last one to complement them, but I'm consistently dumbfounded that Apple seems to be the only of the major (or even minor, if you consider the various Unix DEs) players that understands that tablets are not desktops, even when they have a keyboard plugged into them. Tablets are all about single tasking, desktops are all about multitasking, and you should not attempt to get that peanut butter in that chocolate.

I think what they are attempting just 'sounds ridiculous' to you because no-one has succeeded yet. If they fail, then you'll turn out to have been right. If they succeed, then they'll do very well.

It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!"

Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces.

Tablets are all about single tasking

Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.

"You don't know if it's a bad idea or not because it hasn't been done yet" is a conversation killing sentence if I've ever heard one. Ok, we agree to disagree, let's stop talking about this for a few months and see what happens!

Meanwhile, it "sounds ridiculous" to me not because it's an untested concept, but because I think tablets are inherently different enough from desktops to justify keeping their interfaces distinctly separate. I don't think it's possible to fit more than one full touch app (or maybe a condensed version of a second one for a few simple use cases) comfortably on a 10" screen (to say nothing of a 7" one). I don't think giant buttons and pleasant whitespace are a good use of a desktop or laptop monitor.

>Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces.

Except that they didn't, in the case of the Start Screen. Program and location menus, quick launch buttons, "pinned apps," and lightweight search bars ala Unity Search/Windows Vista and 7 start menu search/dmenu, all of which don't obscure the entire screen while I'm trying to do something, are just some of the desktop workflow-friendly solutions to the "how do I start doing something else" problem that come to mind. The Start Screen doesn't completely break Windows, but it's still a bad idea on the desktop, and at least one instance of Microsoft prioritizing their tablet interface over their desktop interface.

>Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.

Being able to prop a condensed view of an app up against an even more condensed view of another app is a far cry from being able to switch between dozens of running programs with a few keypresses and/or a mouse click. I'm not saying that it's not a good option to have available, it's just not in any way comparable to the style of multitasking that desktop interfaces are designed around.

That's Apple's stance, which I disagree with. Even today, some tasks are just faster and more natural with touch regardless of whether it's on a desktop computer or a tablet.

Incorporating touch into a desktop OS also forces the industry (PC manufacturers, software developers, etc.) to innovate and think outside the box. Perhaps in the future, we no longer position our monitors upright all the time.

Lastly, if you don't like touch-based interface, you don't have to use it.

We still eat with forks and knives, cars still have a steering wheel in front of us, a pen still looks similar as the plumes of way back, etc...

Monitors not upright? I don't think so. Some things just exist as they are because, of all possibilities, they are the most convenient. You can put monitors on the floor, on the ceiling, horizontal in front of you, or vertical in front of you. The latter turned out to be the most convenient.

Now we have the technology to make small phones with displays and use them. That is very convenient. But will it make me work on that on a desk? No.

Have you tried Windows 8 for a day or two?

> Perhaps in the future, we no longer position our monitors upright all the time

Some manufacturers are working on heading in this direction. Exhibit 1, the new Dell XPS One: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-one-27-2710-aio-t/pd?&~ck=m...

Two different types of devices with two different input paradigms.

Look at the Surface Pro. One device, two different input paradigms depending on what you're trying to achieve. I can be sitting at work hacking C code in vim in the desktop paradigm, then switch to the tablet paradigm for watching a video or playing a game on the bus home. Personally I think it sounds great and I'm looking forward to replacing my Macbook Air and iPad with one device that can fill the role of both.

All of the backwards-looking nostalgia from all of the commenters posting so far are exactly why Apple were able to get out of the door with iPad first and slowly destroy Microsoft's pre-eminence. Had Redmond produced the iPad, it's users would have rejected it - and demanded a "Start" button! Quite ludicrous. Ballmer may be gutting the company of all of it's talent and slowly running it into the ground but, unbelievably, I am with him on this one.

I'm not too sure. The overwhelming opinion seems to be that Metro works quite well on touch devices.

Just forcing it onto desktop users is the actual problem.

The problem is Apple separated the two, with 2 separate use cases. And people bought into that. Microsoft is not doing that. They are merging the two, and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

A new survey from Avast shows the same thing. What's surprising is that a third of the respondents even plan to switch to Mac next because of Windows 8:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/11/14/poll-shows-us-...

Not entirely correct, from the article "While 68% indicated they would get one of the new Windows 8 models, 30% planned to buy an Apple iPad touch tablet, and 12%, an Apple Macintosh computer." Math seems a bit off here.

As if there haven't been tablets with Windows and a start button ;).

It's exactly the opposite, Microsoft thought they could get away with a traditional interface on a modern touch device.

Redmond produced good tablet PCs, that were about 1.5x the price of a comparable laptop.

Apple produced a good enough tablet with about 0.5x the price of a comparable (for some uses) laptop.

Pricing matters.

The start screen and missing start button are indeed steps forward when implemented properly and I think Microsoft is most of the way there. I would be very displeased if they added the start menu or button back.

There is still a start button, and they made it larger. The four corners of the screen are the fastest and easiest targets to acquire aside from the pixel directly under the current mouse position. The lower left corner is infinitely larger and easier of a target to hit than the old start button. The only place this breaks down is inside a virtual machine (you can still use the corner to open the menu but it's significantly slower).

As for the start screen replacing the start menu on the desktop, I think it's still a net win. How often do you need to see your current desktop while navigating the start menu? I can't think of one occurrence in my ten or so years of using Windows on a daily basis. If the rest of the screen is not actively used for the task, why fill it with noise?

The start screen on all of the Windows 8 installs that I've used opens just as fast as the previous start menu. I primarily use search (Windows Key + Start Typing...) and it works better than the previous version by taking advantage of the additional space on the screen.

I'm not sure if this is even a story. What's a rational well-reasoned argument for bringing back the start menu or button other than "it's what I'm used to"?

The start button itself never was restricted to just the space of the button. The lower-left corner has always worked the same way (well, not in NT4 and not in XP if you had the language bar in the task bar). Still, for a very long time and at least for US customers the lower-left corner has worked to bring up the start menu.

Fair enough, but I would hazard a guess that most users in versions previous to Windows 8 attempted to click on the center of the button, a slower movement than hitting the bottom left corner of the screen.

not in XP if you had the language bar in the task bar

So that is the reason. I've never understood why the lower-left corner thing worked on some XP machines and not others. Now I know, Thank you!

Fun fact: The lower-left corner isn't actually the start button. Instead your mouse cursor gets moved a little up and to the right when you click so that the click occurs on the button (the movement is always in the direction of the button, even if you click next to the button instead of the corner(. You can still see this when the language bar is docked in the task bar, except that the pointer movement on click is not enough to overcome the added height due to the language bar.

This trickery only works at the very edge of the screen, though. So if you click just a pixel below the start button (when it's moved upwards by the language bar) then nothing will happen.

I suspect that was once a rushed usability fix after noticing in testing that people apparently couldn't hit the button if they just moved their mouse right into the corner. And moving the pointer by a bit was perhaps deemed less likely to break anything than simulating a click on the button.

Or Microsoft just wasn't that good with testing back then (I think the language bar was introduced in Windows 2000, along with the problem), since most US users won't have multiple keyboard layouts or languages configured. Most users in other countries however do – at least I always got the US keyboard layout installed alongside with the German one (which leads to people being very confused about why their keyboard produces strange symbols because they happened to hit Alt+Shift by accident).

Uhm, I guess I got a little side-tracked here.

Older start menu prevents context switch... it's way simpler to multitask when your screen doesn't constantly switch between full screen windows.

You would think that, but it simply doesn't hold true when you actually use it awhile. The start screen is for launching (or viewing quick updates on weather and other junk); you're not in it that much, and when you are, it's a much better tool than the old start menu. I seriously think people here form opinions based on thin air instead of experience.

Where is this love of the Start Menu coming from? Can't people just type in the name of program they're interested in?

What does the Start Menu offer that people miss?

Some people apparently still click. But there is indeed a portion of users that benefit more from a start menu. If you regularly have to use Windows 8 via RDP, either in a window or on a multimon configuration, then have fun hitting the hot corners. And the start screen needs plenty of time getting rendered over a network.

The RDP complaints sound justified to me. Fading, sliding and other animations sound like they would cause a headache, as would the hot corners.

Personally I don't like that the new start menu takes up an entire screen. You're right that people can just type in the name of the program they're interested in, but in that case it makes even less sense to me for the start menu to take up all that space unnecessarily. It's just jarring to me that if I ever want to launch a program from the new start menu, I'll have to drop everything I'm doing when I might otherwise be looking at another window.

Really I think the new start menu is meant to be easier for people who don't just type in the name of the program they're interested in, allowing them to put all the apps and programs they use onto their start menu and arrange them however they want, not unlike an extended "favourites" menu.

Apparently people like GUIs

Have you used Windows 8 on the desktop? The start menu and the desktop top are two separate "eco systems" for lack of a better word. When you're on the desktop, you can't just start typing and have search popup what it finds like you can on the start menu.

The new start menu is a usability nightmare. I can't get desktop alerts on my Start Menu (from AV and Firewall). Toast notifications, when desktop programs catch up to that functionality, won't be as elaborate as desktop notifications. Meaning I won't be able to click "allow" or "deny" or "block" while in the start menu.

In addition, when I RDP into my Windows 8 machine from my mac, the hot corners on the mac are for OSX functionality and begin to interfere with bringing up the start menu

You never could "just start typing" when on the desktop. You either had to click the start button or the windows key. That's still true in Windows 8.

I didn't say you could. But the start menu was always one click away. Now it's a hot corner, a click, and typing to find the program, away.

Well except I bought and paid for Start8 and I've been way happier with it installed.

Or just hit the windows key (or Ctrl-Esc) and type. Why do people like to click so much?

"But the start menu was always one click away. Now it's a hot corner, a click, and typing to find the program"

I do not have Windows 8 but just reading this makes it sounds like two methods that are exactly the same?

  - moving the mouse to the start orb == moving the mouse to a hot corner
  - clicking the orb == clicking the hot corner
  - typing == typing

>Have you used Windows 8 on the desktop?

Yes, I used the previews and it's my primary OS at home.

> The start menu and the desktop top are two separate "eco systems" for lack of a better word. When you're on the desktop, you can't just start typing and have search popup what it finds like you can on the start menu.

I'm not sure I follow. If you hit the Windows key and begin typing, you have search across your whole system. It's essentially the same as Windows 7 with the exception of user interface. (ie. the same functionality is present)

Universal search isn't really universal if the functionality doesn't act the same throughout the system. I agree that the search functionality from the start menu is excellent. Just starting to type away will automatically bring up search and begin to almost instantaneously offer results FROM THE START MENU ONLY.

Want this functionality from the desktop? NOPE! Want this functionality from the App Store? NOPE!

Spatial rather than lexical memory.

I have a console, aliases, scripts etc. if I want to start programs with typing.

The new start screen is actually perfect for spatial memory. Instead of an unordered list of programs on the start menu, you get a colorful matrix of icons you can size and arrange however you like. For those with lexical memory, hit the windows key and type a few letters and you're good to go. It's really the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately not for my purposes; my start menu is not unordered, it is dense, categorized and alphabetical - like this: http://imgur.com/XRAG1

Can't people just type in the name of program they're interested in?

For the same reason people like vi -- switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse is slow, inefficient, and distracting. When using the mouse, you want to stay on the mouse as long as possible. When using the keyboard, you want to stay on the keyboard as long as possible.

They better do as to be honest, I'll be fucked if I'm going to use it any more unless it happens.

Historically, I have used Windows 8 from CP, to RP and now RTM exclusively. Unfortunately, I now have to use RDP and as a VMware guest regularly, which due to the hot corners and the fact that some apps whinge about resolution being low if you run in a smaller than 1378x768 window, it is absolutely unusable. It's so backwards it's sickening.

Windows 8 works best as a VMWare guest OS. :)

I don't see what it the problem with the new windows 8 dashboard... I really think it works just fine... I mean just because you are used to the start menu doesn't mean you can't change... OSX and Ubuntu(random one) don't have a start menu and they do just fine. It's just that you need to get used to it. I don't think MS will bring it back. And people will soon forget about it.

OS X and Ubuntu also don't have two modes of operating. Win8 is basically two operating systems that you can freely switch between.

(I use Windows for games and for testing in IE. I use OS X as my primary OS. The below is from a few hours of using Win8 after upgrading last week. I have been using Windows since the 3.1 days.)

In Win8 you can click on the Desktop charm and get to the desktop. There is absolutely no way to get back to the Metro start screen by clicking on something on the screen. You have to go to a 5x5px hidden block in the bottom-left of the screen and then click on the start block thing. Or use the keyboard.

When in Metro you have to go to the bottom-right corner and then wait and then go to the middle of the right in order to access settings. Or something. I can't really figure out how I manage to get the right side menu to pop out. I just move it around on the bottom right side of the screen until something happens. I still can't figure out how to edit charms.

There is nothing you can click on to see all of your apps. You have to start typing while in Metro. I had to use Google to figure this out. A "find apps" or something charm would be helpful.

Win8 is so chock full of mystery meat navigation that I cannot use it with the mouse. I'm having to use the keyboard to do anything. And it's so undiscoverable that I can not recommend it to anyone that isn't a power user.

The Win8 UI is really bad. They'll make it better but as it stands now, it's awful and unusable for normal people.

pfft! What a load of toosh. This is just marketing crap from Stardocks as they realise their precious desktop theming software is redundant. Who themes their desktop other than kids anyway?

It was redundant the moment Windows 7 shipped.

I think MS needs to quit trying to reinvent entire OS's and start tweaking features within the OS and specific portions of the OS. That I think is one thing that Apple did correctly. They keep a similar user experience between versions but tweak various features within it building upon the previous release.

You'll be delighted to find the UX in desktop mode to be pretty much the same (sans Start Menu, which becomes more and more obsolete if you pin stuff to the task bar) with loads of nice tweaks. From a better file copy dialog to a new task manager – the improvements are there.

one thing that Apple did correctly

Am I the only person who remembers the switch from OS 9->OS X? The noise around Windows 7->Windows 8 sounds quite similar to the noise Mac users where making around that time.

What I find really irritating, is the lack of interaction between the start menu and the desktop. I use current AV and Firewall software that's "Windows 8 compatible". However, if I'm in the app store and attempt to launch an app from there, the firewall will happily block it with no notifications visible where I am currently (app store, or start menu)

If I then go back to the desktop, I can answer the alert from the firewall AND go back to the app store and use the app. I've since learned that the start menu will have toast notifications, but everything that I'm reading about them is that they will not have the same elaborations that desktop notifications have. In other words, I can't answer "allow", "deny", "block" or anything else while in the start menu.

Is nobody else seeing this behavior?

The only thing that bothers me about the new Start menu is that it takes an extra step to get to the point where I can search for programs. I'd been using that feature anyway but now I have to get to the charms and go to "Search". I'd like to hit a shortcut to do that.

Not really, just press the Windows key and start typing. You don't even have to go to search.

Or, if you want an explicit “Search for apps”, then it's Win+Q.

Just hit your windows key, and start typing.

The only thing that annoys me is the split up of searching for programs, settings (control panel applets), and files. I alway hit start and then begin typing, but 2/3 of the time don't see what I'm looking for. I have to notice that I'm actually looking for a setting or file and then change context. I know there are shortcuts to jump straight to searching files or settings, but I'm not always thinking about that. Especially when it is a gray area like control panel applets or small utility programs that I don't have shortcuts for.

When most search implementations are becoming more single and "unified", Windows has taken a step backwards.

Why can't they just copy Apple's Spotlight?

I also haven't been able to figure out how to search the app store. The same "universal" search functionality that works from the start menu (by just starting to type anywhere), doesn't work in the app store. Right-clicking in the app store doesn't work either. What am I missing?

You have to bring up the charm menu (mouse in upper right or windows-c), and then click search and then start typing. Took me far too long to figure that out.

Fuckin' A. Thanks...

Now that you've learned it, you'll find it works for almost every app. Windows Store isn't approving many apps that don't use the built-in search (other than games and things where search doesn't make sense)

It's still very counterintuitive to the universal search functionality that exists on the start menu. Which, I might add, is fucking fantastic!

It doesn't make sense to my feeble mind to bring up a charm for search while in the App Store. Why can't I simply just start typing?

Now that I can't answer. I do know their goal for making it a charm was to provide an easy platform for apps to implement search, to get as much participation as possible. That said, each app could still individually make design choices toward usability. Seems like what you're asking for should have been an obvious improvement in such a central app (and put usability far beyond Apple's App Store).

But their “telemetry data” and “Customer Experience Improvement Program”!

Seriously, I’m not joking: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274107/windows-8-start-me....

Well, I am, but at the expense of Microsoft.

I have no problem with the new system, but I am not the median Windows user. Microsoft’s design by committee and telemetry data sound like self-parody, to be perfectly honest.

And now that we’re at it, can’t we make a(nother) sacrificial offering for the abomination that is the Skype app?

Microsoft has a history of maintaining backward compatibility even at the expense of a less clean design. In that context, bringing back the start button sounds very plausible.

There is a way to bring the start menuback without the hot corners, why is everyone bs'ing

bring up charms bar and click the start button

I have no problems with usability when remoting on from my windows 7 pc

I doubt it'd happen.

Plus, the new head of Windows was the one that brought the Ribbon to Office.

If it did happen, it'd be just the button, which would then trigger the start screen.

it'd be just the button, which would then trigger the start screen.

That's the current behavior, except without the visible button.

Will they stop forcing me to use all the Metro stuff while in desktop mode, too? That's what I want to know. I installed Windows 8 on a laptop, and I immediately felt the need to have the start button back and get rid of the annoying "Charms", and also of the Metro start screen, which is completely useless and space-wasteful in desktop mode.

But then I realized - why do I even bother with all these hacks, to make it look like a more "regular" Windows, when I can just use Windows 7? Besides all those annoyances, I didn't find that the desktop mode of Windows 8 offered me any real advantages over Windows 7. It's more like a SP2 for Windows 7.

I really like the chrome and general UX enhancements in Windows 8. Aero from Win 7 is hard for me to look at. My biggest frustration with Win8 is indeed its lack of a traditional start-style desktop experience.

Then just disable Aero.

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