Hi there
Again these articles seem to over concentrate on the stupid MENU (or lack of it) -- If you boot straight to desktop and have your most used apps pinned to desktop (do this by opening File location and then send to desktop) or to the task bar then the menu is essentially an irrelevance -- and in any case you can get a much better menu by creating a custom toolbar rather than that huge windows 7 menu expanse - the toolbar creates an XP like menu which is far better on large screens anyway.
Booting straight to desktop, disabling the charms feature and the applications list (2nd "start screen") and the far better search are worthwhile in themselves for desktop users.
Even in W7 I hardly ever bothered with the menu.
Cheers
jimbo
I'm glad to see you're attempting to drive these points home as I've seen in some of your other posts from time to time. MS has attempted to satisfy the "Desktoppers" with option to boot up to it, configure to use All Apps instead of Start Screen, and disable the hot corners. To me these are significant changes to make it "feel" and perform like past "desktop orientated" OSs, but yet they continue to get the flack for it as we see here in another article.
You've also been posting/teaching about alternative menus to replace the Start Menu, which IMO makes sense. According to MS data, I, like you and many others, never used it only to use alternative menus and/or plaster shortcuts on the Taskbar. When that got to be looking too big, messy, and unmanageable users placed them all over the Desktop. How many Desktops have we seen this way? I don't know about anyone else, but I've seen a lot of them on many a machine.
It even got to the point where I was plastering Favorites shortcuts. I figured why should I waste a time to open a menu to open a browser, or simply open by other means, then look for the site page I wanted, when all I had to do was press one icon and poof! I was there! Lol! It got to be where there were so many icons it was difficult to see the background.
I don't mean to sound crude, but I think when people get over the fact that the Start Menu is gone for good will they make progress to look for and use alternatives. Personally I like the Start Menu/All Apps as it is by default for personal reasons, which would only be opinion and not based on fact when it comes to efficiency of use and aesthetics. The fact remains that less and less users were using the Start Menu, so therefore MS changed it. Did they use it to their advantage for a touch-centric launching platform? You betcha'. Does it work well with mouse and/or keyboard? I think it does, but that, again, would be my opinion. I have yet to see results on efficiency studies of this. Perhaps someone will point me in that direction. Until then, it is only based on opinion.
http://www.eightforums.com/windows-8-news/2886-designing-start-screen.html which will lead to
Evolving the Start menu - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
We’d like to share a series of blog posts on the how and why of reimagining Start. This first post talks about the history and evolution of the Start menu, and several of the problems and trends we’ve learned from you. We think it’s always important to understand where we’ve come from before we talk about where we’re headed. We’ll then have another post that dives into how we crafted the new Start screen, and then we’ll see where the discussion leads us from there.