The death of the Start menu: Microsoft’s defense goes into high gear

If you’ve played with the Windows 8 Developer Preview, you know that the old Windows 7 Start orb in the lower-left corner of the Windows desktop has been replaced by a black hole. Click on the black hole, and you’re catapulted out of the familiar Windows desktop and into the new, improved, touch-centric Metro interface. If your users had trouble migrating from the XP-style Windows Start menu to the Vista/Windows 7 Start menu — even now, millions of people use the old-fashioned Start — you can just imagine what will happen when they click the new Windows 8 Start icon. You might as well engrave your help desk phone number on every Metro tile.

That change has upset a lot of people, so Microsoft has responded by producing volumes of material explaining why the death of the familiar Start menu will be a good thing — really. In fact, Microsoft is providing statistics to show that this new approach is what you and your users need, by golly, even if you don’t realize it. In a move designed to make any Windows support person see red, Microsoft has even given the Metro tiled touch interface a new name: the Start screen, as if it were a fitting progeny of the Start menu. Hey, don’t shoot me. I’m only the messenger.

If you want to read Microsoft’s side of the story, you can find it in three posts on the Building Windows 8 blog: “Evolving the Start menu,” “Designing the Start screen,” and “Reflecting on your comments on the Start screen.” Be prepared for some heavy slogging — the three posts come to about 40 pages of dense exposition, with more than 1,500 viewer comments. It’s clear that Microsoft has decided to respond to user concerns with piles of justifications that comes down to, basically, “you will like it, whether you think so or not.”

If I may be so bold as to paraphrase Microsoft’s magnum opus, the gist of the argument against the dearly departing Start menu and in favor of the new touch-centric Metro tiled Start screen goes like this: The Start menu is cumbersome and old-fashioned, and an abundance of apps make the Start menu bulky, hard to navigate, and confusing. The Start menu’s being used less frequently with each new version of Windows. Most people pin apps to the Taskbar, not the Start menu, and they use the Taskbar apps more and more.

Net result: The Start menu has become an inefficient way to launch apps that you don’t use very often. By contrast, Windows Phone 7, er, the Metro tiled interface, uh, the Windows 8 Start screen is a new, colorful, alive “heads up display” that makes it easy to organize and group apps. It’s easier to use the zoomable Start screen tiled interface, rather than the strict hierarchy of the Start menu. You can cram more apps on the Start screen than you would normally pin on the Start menu.

The blogs also give other reasons for Start screen superiority that I find specious, at best. For example, the Windows 8 team believes that the Start screen delivers better search results than the Start menu. I don’t agree. While the Start screen shows pretty pictures, a search from the Start menu includes a lot of information that Windows 8 doesn’t show, at least in this version. In addition, the Start screen approach to Search requires you to pick a specific search type — Apps, Settings, Files, Email, Social Contacts — in order to hook into the Contract search model in Windows 8. The new approach is different, decidedly prettier, undoubtedly faster, but not necessarily better.

The final blog talks a bit about enterprise IT, but many of the proffered advantages of the Start screen approach apply to the Start menu as well — for example, the ability to remove items from the Start menu and lock it down. While the final version of Windows 8 will “support deployment scenarios that include Start screens with a layout of tiles that matches their business group’s needs, allowing for an even greater number of pinned apps to be pre-defined for their users,” it isn’t at all clear that having more Start screen tiles will do anything to improve worker productivity. The ability to put 150 app tiles on a 27-inch monitor’s Start screen just gives me a headache.

Before you haul out the tar and feathers, realize that all of this is changing. In the Developer Preview, you only see simple demo Metro apps, for example, but soon many of the apps you’ll want to use all the time will be on the Start screen. That may make the black hole more appealing. Or maybe not. We’re still in the Developer Preview — not even in beta — so anything can happen. But more and more people are starting to get worried that the black hole will ship in the final version of Windows 8.

(By the way, you can bring back the old Windows 7 Start menu in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog shows you how. Be aware of the fact that by filling in the black hole, you lose the ability to see the Metro tiles.)

Microsoft says that this debate about Start menu versus Start screen is “eerily like the debate in the 1980s over whether a mouse was a gimmick, a productivity time waster, or an innovation in the user experience.” I disagree. The debate is a whole lot more like the one over the ribbon in Office 2007. (Full disclosure: I don’t like the ribbon, and I never have.) In that case, Microsoft made a wholesale change to the user interface, throwing away a perfectly usable — but arguably less capable — interface that millions knew, replacing it with a new interface that threw everyone into months of therapy.

I hope and pray that the current Windows 8 management team learned a bitter lesson from the Office 2007 team. (I say that realizing fully that they’re basically the same people.) Office 2007 sales took a hard hit because enterprises — and, to a lesser degree, individuals — didn’t want to learn the new interface. It would’ve been trivially easy for Microsoft to build Office 2007 with both the ribbon and an option to switch the old menus back on. Microsoft didn’t, and it lost a lot of sales because of that decision.

Even if the Start screen is the greatest thing since object-oriented programming, Microsoft still needs to give us an option to bring the old Start menu back. It doesn’t need to be pretty. It doesn’t need to do anything different. It doesn’t even need to link to the Metro, er, Start screen apps. It just has to be there. Give us a chance to use both the Start menu and the Start screen, and let us make the transition at our own pace.

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