With Sinofsky Gone, Start Menu Could Return to Windows 8

Speculation piled on top of more speculation, Hacker News indeed...<p>FTA: "Currently Microsoft isn't commenting on the subject, but an article published by USA Today points to the <i>possibility</i>."<p>From the USA Today "article":<p>"The canning of Steven Sinofsky 15 days after the launch of Windows 8 <i>could</i> <i>signal</i> the start of Microsoft dealing with lukewarm reception to its latest operating system."

My prediction has always been that the start menu is gone in Win8 to force people into Metro-mode and bootstrap the tablet app ecosystem. Once the tablet ecosystem is well populated then there's no need to force users into Metro.<p>Windows 8 is a write-off in terms of corporations- Microsoft expects very few to upgrade to Win8. So they sacrifice a bit of usability to kickstart tablets, then bring back the start menu to make corporations happy in Win 9.

<i>cough</i> I had a feeling... <i>cough</i><p>I'll just leave this here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793620" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793620</a>

The UX is broken, but adding the start button would only break it more. I don't have much confidence in their design team, but I think they know there is no returning to the start button.

Classic Shell is free and open source. No need to buy Stardock. <a href="http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/</a>

Do people not understand the start screen works exactly the same as the start menu? Hit win key and type to search. Forget win+q or the charm.

Bullshit. Start menu is a prehensile tail. MS has better sense than this.

The major drawback of Windows 8 is not just that it lacks the start button, but that it forces you into Metro. Get rid of that and I might consider whatever is coming next after Windows 8.<p>And stop combining the two UI paradigms in such a messy way. The Charms UI looks very out of place in the desktop UI. It's like they worked for 2 years on the Metro desktop, and in parallel at Windows SP2, and at the end they combined the two very quickly as an afterthought (proof that nothing really integrates between desktop mode and Metro mode), and the end result was what is now Windows 8.

Launchy is your friend.