About That New Start Menu (Premium)

It’s been a tough month for Microsoft fans. Between Apple’s blockbuster Mac announcements and the respective closings of Mixer and the Microsoft retail stores, we’ve been reeling from hit after hit. And then the Apple developers leaked benchmark scores for prototype Apple silicon-based Macs, demonstrating that the performance of this system is, as feared, dramatically better than that of Microsoft’s Surface Pro X. Surely there’s some good news out there.

That good news seemingly arrived yesterday in the form of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20161, which features what Microsoft calls a “freshening up” of the Start menu in which the “solid color backplates” that have been used behind icons and tiles is removed, creating what it says is “a more streamlined design.”

Many believe that good design is in the eye of the beholder, but I as noted to one commenter the other day, it’s equally possible that good design is just good design, and that if someone doesn’t like good design, you know, maybe they just have bad taste.

The question, of course, is whether this is good design.

My answer may confuse you. The refreshed Start menu is not a “design” at all. Instead, it’s just a minor change to a design that debuted in 2015 with the original release of Windows 10. It’s so minor, in fact, that it doesn’t even rise to the level of “lipstick on a pig.”

Let me explain.

For those who haven’t heard this story, the designer of the Microsoft Office ribbon once confided to me that Microsoft used to refer to previous Office UX overhauls as “lipstick on a pig.” That is, with each new version of Office, Microsoft would semi-arbitrarily change the look and feel of the toolbars and menus, not to make them better or prettier, but just to make them different. The idea was that you could look over the shoulder of someone using Office and immediately tell which version it was by the look and feel. Lipstick on a pig was about making life easier on support personnel and not about making Office better. (Though there were often functional improvements, too, of course.)

So lipstick on a pig is one level of design. It is, at least, different from what came before. But the new Start menu isn’t even different enough that most people would see the difference. If you looked over the shoulder of two people using two different Windows 10 versions, one with the refreshed Start menu and one without, you’d have to be really paying attention to see the differences. From a distance, you’d never spot them.

More important, this change doesn’t alter the functionality of the Start menu in the slightest. There are no new features, just a subtly changed look.

Many readers probably don’t remember, and never actually used, a release called Windows Mobile 6.5. This version of Windows Mobile was quickly pushed out to modernize Microsoft’s smartphone OS in the wake of the release of the iPhone, which had embarrassed the rest of the industry. Windows Mobile 6.5’s biggest improvements were literally surface-level. There was a refreshed lock screen and a new home screen that featured hexagonal icons/tiles and was touch-friendly. But once you got below that level, to the apps or other interfaces that Windows Mobile provided, it was all old-school, a UX that had been designed not for touch, but for those tiny styluses that we used to use.

In some ways, you might argue that Windows Mobile 6.5 was basically just lipstick on a pig. But it was more than that because it actually did come with new functionality. That lock screen was really innovative in that the notification icons would appear in a vertical column and if you swiped one of them, the phone would unlock and go right to that application. And the new home screen was also new, and it was arguably the first Microsoft OS to offer what later became tiles.

And sorry, but the new Start menu doesn’t even rise to that level of new either. It’s … almost nothing.

To put this in perspective, Apple recently unveiled a completely refreshed macOS user experience that will ship in Big Sur publicly in two months. This new UX is completely consistent from top to bottom, with no legacy UIs hiding anywhere in the system. It’s fresh and modern and undeniably attractive.

Microsoft, meanwhile, isn’t refreshing the entire UX. It’s just refreshing the Start menu. And it’s doing so in a pre-release build of Windows that doesn’t even map to an actual release of the platform. It is, as Microsoft says, “from [its] Active Development Branch and [is] not tied to any upcoming Windows 10 release.”

So, the very earliest that this refreshed Start menu will appear on customers’ PCs is with Windows 10 version 21H1, which will ship in April-ish 2021. But it may not appear in that release. Or, like Sets, in any release. And even when/if it does appear, it’s not like Microsoft will magically make the rest of the system consistent and as attractive as the Start menu.

Look, this is absolutely a step in the right direction. But it’s just one step. One tiny step. Towards a future that won’t be a reality until 2021 at the earliest. And we should want—and need—much more than this.