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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday June 04 2014, @11:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the Interface-Resurrection dept.

Mary Jo Foley reports at ZDNet that according to sources who've had good track records on Windows information, Microsoft won't be delivering a new Start Menu for Windows 8 with its coming Windows 8.1 Update 2, after all. "Up until recently, Microsoft was hoping to make a new "Mini" Start Menu part of a second update to Windows 8.1," says Foley. "Windows 8.1 Update 2 was and still is, last I heard slated to arrive in August of this year." Microsoft's operating systems group has decided to hold off on delivering a Microsoft-developed Start Menu until Threshold, the next "major" release of Windows. Threshold, which may or may not ultimately be called Windows 9, is expected to be released in April 2015.

The original Windows 8 interface lacked the Start Menu, a familiar component of previous versions of the operating system, replacing it with the live tile-driven Start screen. Many users didn't like the change, and some PC manufacturers and developers offered ways to bring back versions of the old Start Menu. Microsoft appeared to relent at Build when it unveiled the revised Start Menu, enhanced with Windows Modern UI improvements.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by darthservo on Wednesday June 04 2014, @02:13PM

    by darthservo (2423) on Wednesday June 04 2014, @02:13PM (#51092)

    It reminds me of a recent forum post I read on Opera. When Opera decided to gut their browser and opt for a Chromium engine, they also stripped a number of features - one of these was bookmarks. According to the post in the forums, it was because Opera found that out of users who participated in the usage reports, 90% of them didn't use bookmarks. Their reasoning was that if only 10% of those users utilized bookmarks then it wasn't an important feature to include. After enough people raised issue, they have been half-baking 'bookmarks' into new releases.

    My guess with Windows 8 and the Start Menu is that Microsoft did something similar - "See! The stats! People only really use $N programs and want to search!! Squares are great!!" I think these usage reports need to be taken with a grain of salt - what kind of demographic opt-in to these usage reports in the first place and do they really represent the majority of your user base?

    It seems as if more companies are adopting a 'less is more' approach in efforts to appeal to a wider audience (hmm...there's a website in there somewhere). It also seems that this can be hit or miss, with seemingly more misses as of recent. However, this trend could simply be in a tick-tock cycle. (Let's hope)

    But I'm acclimated to the Start Menu. It seems like it's that pool that's cold until you get your shoulders under the water, but even then it's not entirely cozy. It still has some quirks, but mostly it was a matter of familiarizing myself with a new layout. It was much more visually jarring until they included the option to match the desktop background, which I personally found helped significantly. The reason I got acclimated to it was because the features (programs, search, organization) of the start menu are still there just presented differently - if they took something out in some way, it would be a different story. But if they dropped it in favor of a classic Start Menu with Windows 9, I certainly wouldn't miss it.

    There are still some other things about the Win 8 UI that drive me nuts. Things like the wifi-manager being restricted to a Metro interface - it may work for most cases, but in others (I can't change the password in a known wifi network?) less is definitely not more. And I still can't understand why user-account tasks (change picture, lock, log out) is located in the top-right, but the original (and still true for tablets) shut down "setting" is in the bottom-right and after a preliminary swipe and a tap.

    --
    "Good judgment seeks balance and progress. Lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration." - Dwight D Eisenhower
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by emg on Wednesday June 04 2014, @04:44PM

    by emg (3464) on Wednesday June 04 2014, @04:44PM (#51210)

    Most users of clue disable any 'usage reports', so the only data they get is from users who don't know how to turn them off and, hence, probably don't know what bookmarks are either.

    Still, good to know I don't need to consider replacing Firefox with Opera, if the developers are that dumb.

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday June 04 2014, @06:41PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday June 04 2014, @06:41PM (#51290) Journal

    I'm guessing the stats show that most people just click the blue e icon thingy to get to MSN/Google/Yahoo/AOL which to them is THE internet. So the start menu is mostly useless. That or they save everything to the desktop. Either way, they made the start menu the new desktop.