Microsoft: Keep the Start menu in Windows 8, please!

The blogosphere lit up over the weekend with screenshots of the latest almost-ready-for-Customer-Preview version of Windows 8, known as Build 8220. You can see the screenshots on the Chinese-language website PCBeta.com.

If you’ve been playing with the Developer Preview, you know that the “legacy” Windows desktop has a big black hole in the lower-left corner, with a very retro Windows Start flag on it. Click on the desktop’s Start flag and you’re hurled into the Metro interface — a very rude comeuppance for anyone expecting the two-decade-old Windows Start menu.

Take a close look at the screenshots of Build 8220 and you’ll see that the flat Start flag from the Developer Preview isn’t there any more. In its place there’s a blank spot that’s about a third as wide as a normal Taskbar icon. I’m told if you hover your mouse (or swipe your finger?) over the new version of the black hole on the legacy desktop, you see a preview of the Metro screen. Click, and you go to the Metro screen. Conversely, if you’re looking at the Metro screen and you hover your mouse or swipe your finger to the lower-left corner, you see a preview of the legacy desktop.

Much ado has been made about the fact that the Windows orb is gone. Meh, says I. Who cares? The Windows orb — and Start button before it — were just convenient hitching posts for hanging access to the Start menu. Microsoft can blow the orb and Start button to smithereens and not affect the way we use Windows. In the future, written instructions won’t say “Click Start” they’ll say “Hover your mouse in the lower-left corner.” Fair enough.

But getting rid of the Start menu? That’s a completely different kettle of fish.

Based on the screenshots, based on the Developer Preview, based on everything I’ve read — including Steve Sinofsky’s series of posts on the subject — it’s obvious that Microsoft isn’t going to give us a Start menu in Windows 8. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that there are no plans to put an optional legacy Start menu on the legacy desktop for running legacy programs. As Sinofsky says, “After studying real-world usage of the Start menu through a variety of techniques, we realized that it was serving mainly as the launcher for programs you rarely use.”

That’s precisely why we need the Start menu! To make it easy to find and launch legacy programs that we don’t use every day. The Start menu embodies a compact, multilevel heirarchy that’s easy to navigate quickly. It has lots of shortcomings — I’ve written chapters in several books about how to work around the problems — but at its heart, the menu structure makes it easy to discover and launch programs I don’t use every day.

An example: I use WordPad once or twice a week. For the past 15 years I’ve been clicking Start, All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, WordPad to bring it up.

The option that we’re being offered — the Metro screen — is clumsy, unwieldy, and bloated. Yes, we can group, name, and zoom tiles on the Metro screen, and we’re given a choice between large tiles and larger tiles. But there’s no collapsing structure, no logical connection among the apps. Everything’s in a blob. Granted, you can create Blob A and Blob B, and if your eyes don’t mind you can squint at the two blobs and all of your other tiles in a heap when you zoom. But there’s no internal structure to it at all.

The situation with Windows 8’s lack of a Start menu brings back really bad memories of Office 2007. With Office 2003, we had menus. Yeah, they had problems: They were getting too large and the logic behind the groupings was tenuous at best. But if I knew how to do a File, Open in some other Windows program, I knew how to do it in Word 2003. Help, About worked the same, as did Edit, Paste Special.

Not so Word 2007. Microsoft threw away the menus and replaced them overnight with Ribbons and tabs. I understand about the Ribbon. I’ve heard all the arguments. I know that studies have rated the Ribbon as one of the greatest steps Microsoft has ever taken in UI design. But I didn’t buy the abrupt cutover then and I don’t buy it now.

Microsoft should’ve given us a way to use old-fashioned Office 2003 menus in Office 2007. Sure, bring on the Ribbon. Make it an option. But don’t kill off the old interface. Don’t discount the enormous amount of training and brute-force memorization that came before it.

When you look at what happened with Office, Microsoft actually brought back the old File menu in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2010. Office 2007’s Ribbons and tabs left customers howling. With Office 2010, there’s an ugly menu on the left side of all those pretty Ribbon tabs — and it works pretty well. Microsoft learned that people really wanted their menus, and they compromised a little bit.

The same thing’s happening, in a slightly different way, with the legacy Windows 8 desktop and the Start menu. We have a new interface to learn. It would be trivial — or at least, not terribly difficult — for Microsoft to build a legacy Start menu capability into the Windows 8 desktop.

Do we have to go through an Office 2010 File menu-style rethink to get a menu back?

I don’t care if it’s attached to an orb, a Start button, or a cow jumping over the moon. I just want the Start menu on the desktop!

This story, “Microsoft: Keep the Start menu in Windows 8, please!,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.