The Windows Start Button May Be Coming Back for Real This Time

There’s big news coming out of the Microsoft MSFT rumor mill this week—at least by Microsoft standards. It seems that the next round of large-scale updates for Windows 8 will include the start menu—the real one this time.

Let’s recap the life of that beloved friend for a minute.

On August 24, 1995 Microsoft released its operating system so uniquely called, Windows 95. As part of that upgrade, Microsoft included the start menu, a central place where users could easily find the programs important to them. The start menu came with a button at the lower left corner that creatively said, “start.”

But not long after its seventeenth birthday, the start menu along with that little start button Windows users loved was gone. In it’s new version of Windows, Windows 8, Microsoft replaced it with what it called a metro screen.

Windows 8 was designed to unify the company’s desktop and mobile operating systems. The metro screen allowed those with a mobile device or touch screen monitor to selected the program they wanted to open. The problem, from a desktop perspective, was that next to nobody had a touch screen monitor and using the mouse on the screen was awkward.

This made the metro screen difficult to work with, not all that attractive, and too much of a departure from the start menu they had grown to love over the past (nearly) two decades.

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So Microsoft, in response to critics, said that the start menu was coming back. Rejoicing erupted in the streets as Windows users learned of the return of a beloved friend but when Windows 8.1 debuted the rejoicing was largely silent. There was no joy in Mudville that day, for the Windows start menu wasn’t the start menu everybody knew. All it did was take the user back to a screen they didn’t like in the first place: the metro screen!

But it appears that rejoicing can begin again. Multiple outlets are quoting a blog post saying that as part of the Windows 8.2 upgrade, the start menu, the real one that everybody loves, will return to Windows. Of course, there’s no word from Microsoft and Windows 8.2, possibly called “Threshold” isn’t expected to be available until sometime in early 2015 but hope is again alive.

As that literary genius Andy Dufesne said in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things,” so will windows faithfuls wait and hope. Maybe this time, all will be good in Mudville again.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Tim Parker had no position in the companies mentioned.