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Comment by pixie_ | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 must be the slowest train wreck in computing history, it's been being reviewed as crap for over a year now and they keep chugging along.

It's funny to read all the comments from over a year ago and how nothing has changed since then - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/18/designing-sear...

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It trainwrecked the day buisinesses decided not to use it, which was the day they got rid of booting to the traditional desktop with a start button.

It isn't a compelling purchase at all, nobody will go out and actively seek a Windows 8 device, and desktop / notebook computers have had decreased sales since everyone has one now and they are "good enough" for media consumption and text / spreadsheet editing. The only reason anyone needs more horsepower now is for graphical horsepower for animation or gaming or computational horsepower for compiling or running a server.

So nobody wants Windows 8. It is a product without a target market, and the Surface has fallen flat on its face as a one trick pony to try to corner a "market" on a tablet with a desktop.

And hopefully in a year we have a mature Ubuntu running on Android tablets just fine, and that IMO will be a much nicer desktop experience on mobile than Microsoft Window and the Windows 7 desktop at 7". Except for a tiny, tiny market of businesses that will buy surfaces for their employees to use the mobile versions of word and excel I don't see this train leaving the station.

Am I the only person who thinks the lack of a start button and a 'traditional desktop' are non issues? The lack of a start button/desktop is not a usability issue in and of itself - it's everything else that makes it such a nightmare.

>The lack of a start button/desktop is not a usability issue in and of itself

Tell that to non-technical users who have trouble remembering to use the start button when it's staring them in the face, they need that visual cue at the very least.

You're right that there should be some sort of affordance to access programs.

What I meant was that the problem isn't that there's no `start` menu - it's that there's no consistent, intuitive, and quick way to access any program (along with having to switch UI's between desktop and metro, and a lot of other things) which are problems that the start menu originally solved.

>Tell that to non-technical users who have trouble remembering to use the start button when it's staring them in the face, they need that visual cue at the very least.

Which is exactly why the damn thing was useless to begin with.

I live on the start menu. It's how I launch all apps. And by typing their name. What part of moving to Win8 required that it no longer fit? I've installed a third party app now, though it's sub-optimal and I'll probably go hunting for something better.

It's been a while since Microsoft have changed the interface for finding and running applications (I think the last major change would have been from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and the introduction of the start menu), but I'd be surprised if the start menu was the absolute be all and end all solution for the problem. I'm not saying that Windows 8 has a superior way, in almost every way it's an inferior experience, but that the presence of the start menu should in no way make or break windows 8.

Last change was xp -> vista I think. When they added the search bar into the start menu.

Launching apps by typing their name still works on Windows 8. Just get to the start screen (winkey or bottom left corner, or via charms bar), then start typing.

And the driver was just pushed overboard, yikes.

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