Microsoft killed the start button because...

[mattx]

My question would be how the hell do they know ?

Have they implemented an update which records mouse and keyboard clicks ?

[jamesfed]

My question would be how the hell do they know ?

Have they implemented an update which records mouse and keyboard clicks ?

 

Ever seen the 'Customer experiance improvement program' crop up?

 

Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program

[Arthur]

My question would be how the hell do they know?

See the Building Windows 8 blog. Specifically...

 

• Designing the Start screen
  
• Reflecting on your comments on the Start screen
  

http://i.imgur.com/S9o5i.png http://i.imgur.com/02EyF.png

[mattx]

Ever seen the 'Customer experiance improvement program' crop up?

 

Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program

 

Nope, anything asking for permission from anything I just deny automatically !!

My system is more tight than a crabs arse at 30000 Fathoms.

[SPM]

You only have to learn it once (unless you have a very bad memory).

 

How people coped in the old days going from Windows 3.1/MS-DOS to Windows 95 I'll never know.

 

MS-DOS was easy. Every action you could do on a CLI has a command, so you can look it up in the index of the manual where it was thoughtfully listed, and the commands were a finite, and relatively compact closed set. Also you couldn't mess up something as easily because in order to do something, you had to type the command for it, and if you didn't know it, you probably shouldn't be typing it anyway.

 

With a GUI, and even worse, a touch interface, things aren't that easy. Things are supposed to be more intuitive than the CLI, but if they aren't intuitive, then things are much more difficult. For example, how do you look up a touch gesture in a manual? You also have a problem with people clicking and dragging etc. to find out what the GUI or touch interface does when you do something, rather than looking up the manual first as you were compelled to do with a CLI interface. This leads to things on the UI getting messed up in a way which didn't happen with a CLI.

Edited January 2, 2013 by SPM

[mattx]

MS-DOS was easy. Every action you could do on a CLI has a command, so you can look it up in the index of the manual where it was thoughtfully listed, and the commands were a finite, and relatively compact closed set. Also you couldn't mess up something as easily because in order to do something, you had to type the command for it, and if you didn't know it, you probably shouldn't be typing it anyway.

 

With a GUI, and even worse, a touch interface, things aren't that easy. Things are supposed to be more intuitive than the CLI, but if they aren't intuitive, then things are much more difficult. For example, how do you look up a touch gesture in a manual? You also have a problem with people clicking and dragging etc. to find out what the GUI or touch interface does when you do something, rather than looking up the manual first as you were compelled to do with a CLI interface. This leads to things on the UI getting messed up in a way which didn't happen with a CLI.

 

.....which is why I tend to use command line still even to this day. And in my point of view it gives you a far better understanding of what you are trying to achieve.

[jamesfed]

Nope, anything asking for permission from anything I just deny automatically !!

My system is more tight than a crabs arse at 30000 Fathoms.

 

But either way there are plenty of people out there (me included) who do tick it and feed Microsoft this data

[gshaw]

See the Building Windows 8 blog. Specifically...

 

• Designing the Start screen
  
• Reflecting on your comments on the Start screen
  

http://i.imgur.com/S9o5i.png http://i.imgur.com/02EyF.png

 

That just proves what I'd always suspected, I don't use Windows like the rest of the world

 

My Start Menu has 7-8 pinned items at the top and I use the jump lists to access recent documents. The amount of time to get there compared to the bottom of the list is negligible compared to the time saved opening Word then loading from the Recent list \ Open box. Personally I hate taskbar pinning as it makes it look cluttered and makes it harder to see what's running and what isn't at a quick glance. Probably part of the reason I find the new Start Screen feels less productive for doing any real work (as opposed to one click app launches)

Edited January 3, 2013 by gshaw

[synaesthesia]

I was concerned about the lack of start menu, so when I moved to 8 I promptly installed classic shell.

That was a fortnight ago. I have pressed the start menu button 0 times. I've just never noticed.

Very different in a non-consumer application though.

[CAM]

Funnily enough, in that heat map of the Metro interface it grows downwards not upwards, so only a few items reach the green area.

 

I've been using Windows 8 for a few months now and can say that the furore over it is a little overblown. Metro is nice once you get used to it but the irony is I don't use live tiles, a few sit there to make the menu look pretty but I wouldn't miss them if they were gone since Metro apps are next to useless on a desktop. Calendar for example exists on my menu purely to provide the date on Metro and the PDF reader was swiftly replaced by FoxIt because it wasn't a full-screen mess. Pinning apps at the side is also a false economy when you can resize a window instead.

 

Right now my taskbar has commonly used apps pinned on the left, My Computer pinned on the right (use toolbars) and the system tray/clock. Nearly all my games are in Steam and launched through that so no need to pin them anywhere (but for some reason the Steam jumplist has shrunk to two games only:( ). The only time I use Start is when I can't find a program in my jumplists and this is where I have to jump into Metro and go through the Charm, Search, find app, Right Click, Pin routine. In fact, I don't even use Charms on a regular basis either.

 

Windows 8, perfectly good if you can ignore everything that makes it distinct from the rest of the Windows family.

 

On a final note, I think this might be an effort by Microsoft to force users into an Apple-like ecosystem. Unfortunately for Microsoft, their tiles system looks set to be dead out the water if they don't make some serious changes to PC Metro before the hatred of it seeps too deeply into other platforms.