Microsoft Justifies Killing the Start Button in Windows 8

Microsoft Justifies Killing the Start Button in Windows 8

Microsoft has explained why they killed off the iconic Start button (Orb in Vista and 7) in Windows 8, which has been with us since Windows 95 debuted almost 17 years ago in late 1995: after some interface changes, people simply stopped using it so much, apparently. It's been widely assumed that Microsoft removed it to force people to use the new Metro interface, which in some ways is just an expanded Start button menu. However, according to a senior Microsoft employee who spoke with PC Pro at TechEd in Amsterdam, it appears that the removal of the Start button was due to changes to the GUI in Windows 7, which caused use of the Start button to drop dramatically.

"We'd seen the trend in Windows 7," said Chaitanya Sareen, principal program manager at Microsoft, referring to the telemetry gathered by the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. "When we evolved the taskbar we saw awesome adoption of pinning [applications] on the taskbar. We are seeing people pin like crazy. And so we saw the Start menu usage dramatically dropping, and that gave us an option. We're saying 'look, Start menu usage is dropping, what can we do about it? What can we do with the Start menu to revive it, to give it some new identity, give it some new power?'"

"So I'm a desktop user, I pin the browser, Explorer, whatever my apps are. I don't go the Start menu as often. If you?re going to the Start screen now, we're going to unlock a whole new set of scenarios, or you can choose not to go there, stay in the desktop, and it's still fast. You can't beat the taskbar."

Sareen also claims that people are using keyboard shortcuts more, further eroding use of the Start button, "Press the Windows key and 1 and you're already in IE [if IE is the first item pinned to your taskbar]. It's so fast."

Sareen's claims don't stack up to me, however. There can easily be hundreds of applications hanging off the Start button, including operating system functions such as Control Panel. You can't simply pin them all to the Taskbar or use obscure keyboard shortcuts to access them - the Start button is the logical place to access them from, especially less frequently used applications. How would it have hurt to keep the Start button as a configurable option in the control panel? No, it still very much looks like Microsoft wants to force everybody onto the Metro interface and slowly migrate people away from the traditional desktop GUI as switching between the GUI and Metro all the time is jarring. Judging by the protests from many users at this decision, the lack of the Start button in Windows 8 could well be its achilles heel, ultimately significantly hurting sales.

Sareen also claimed that the Metro interface "really works well with the mouse and keyboard", highlighting features such as the option to search for applications simply by starting to type its name on the Metro Start screen.

PC Pro

Posted by | Sat, Jun 30, 2012 - 01:53 AM

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Source: http://www.legitreviews.com/news/13533/

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