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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

The 'worst' part is that Windows 8 is actually fine, except for the extremely superficial differences. Given the many options for reverting Windows 8 to essentially a faster Windows 7 but with a new UI, Microsoft has really shot itself in the foot.

If MS provided a group policy toggle to essentially say 'force Windows Classic mode', enterprises would have a lot less reluctance (beyond the normal reluctance that IT has to anything new, which is to get the enterprise's infrastructure into a state of balance and then not touch it for ten years).

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Only if you think basic UI functionality and a few decades of muscle memory x a few tens of millions of people is "superficial", that is.

It doesn't matter how awesome the changes under the hood are if it's painful to use. And I'd argue that the unwarranted attempt to shoehorn a (mediocre by itself) touch UI into a desktop, poorly, ranks as "painful", never mind the knock-on effects with certain configurations (laptop touchpads interpreting normal mouse movement as swipe gestures for example).

FYI, Windows doesn't interpret mouse movements as swipe gestures. Certain trackpad ODMs (i.e. Synaptics) did that, and did a terrible job of it.

They are superficial in "it will cust just a few hours of development time to fix". But certainly aren't superficial in "the user experience does not suffer because of them".

Microsoft is living a lot of money on the table.

I actually prefer the 8 UI to 7's. You click the start menu, and your intention is clearly to interact only with the menu, so why not make it take up the whole screen? The application icons on the bottom are also much more space efficient.

I think a majority of the complaints come from "this is different!" not "this is worse!".

No, the intention is to quickly start something without distracting from the main screen. There is no sane reason to go fullscreen here, if i have Writer open and want to start a calculator or MSN or whatever other app. I needed a few trials until i found where to shut down that stupid OS (and eventually installed the classic menu).

Interestingly i have a touchscreen laptop but on my main OS (Linux) i went the complete opposite direction lately, with a much more keyboard-driven setup, no fancy animations. Basically a distraction-free work machine, and not the colorful, animation-loaded distraction "beast" Windows has become.

I think the function of the windows key, where a menu pops up in the right and you can type out the application name, is what you want for that purpose. Ubuntu does the same thing. I'm pretty keyboard-centric myself, and this works really well for me. The fullscreen start menu is nice when you forget the exact name of the application, IMO.

> Ubuntu does the same thing.

And Ubuntu has similarly turned into an example of what not to do. This fad of cramming a touch UI down the throat of mouse users and acting like it's all perfectly natural is obscene.

I'm talking specifically about a feature that enables fast keyboard access to applications. I don't see how that has anything to do with mouse or touch UI.

Ubuntu's UI has its own issues, but that's not the point.

Synapse does a good job of this , but doesn't require the entire screen.

Ah, I wasn't on my windows computer when I checked it. I guess the standard windows key does go to fullscreen. The fast, small one is Win+S. It would be nice to be able to switch them.

Ah: http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1081755-do-you-like-or-hat...

So this is a post saying that they removed the start menu because they didn't want to update it a bit?

It's not really relevant to a "force windows classic" mode because the listed bugs are mostly interactions with new features.

The claim that they would have had to sacrifice significant other features is a strawman.

And they're doing the work anyway for the next service pack, apparently...

That post was from two years ago.

There were a lot of reasons the old start menu was removed. I listed some technical reasons why "just leave it in as an option" isn't as easy as it sounds.

It is not a straw man to say that investing in one area means you have to sacrifice in others. This is what we call software development.

Features are not added in service packs, and I don't even think service packs exist anymore (service packs are just collections of security and reliability updates, created and packaged together by a special "sustained engineering" team, not the product team).

The product team is building a new start menu option for a future version of Windows. It's a significant undertaking, not something they're throwing together willy nilly. They don't have a time machine, so they can't go back to 2012 and ship it then.

Yea, they are going to a different model, and I think they are going to ship the start menu in a future update.

Still, given that the missing start menu is most folks' #1 complaint about Windows 8, wouldn't you have to say that (at least in hindsight) it was a mistake to leave it out? Yes, software engineering is always about compromises, but isn't it also about making the right compromises?

> Features are not added in service packs

  Security Center
  Popup Blocking in IE
  Image Blocking in OE
  DEP
  Some others I can't remember

IIRC those were features introduced with Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.

It's a straw man to suggest that putting in the effort to update a fancy menu would have had so much impact that the product would have been ruined. But I think I misread your clause about 'disjointed' at first.

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