Ask Paul: September 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let's kick off the final weekend of summer a little early with another great set of reader questions.
Start me up
Christian-Gaeng asks:

Do you have any information about what Microsoft plans to do with the start menu in the future? The problem with interacting with the start menu has always been that it is basically always closed. I also think the latest idea of showing information about mobile phone notifications is nonsense.

I agree with you about the bizarre coming Start integration with Phone Link, which couldn't look more ridiculous or poorly designed. But then, this is emblematic of the problems with the Windows 11 Start menu or, even more generally, of the weird focus on minutiae we see now from this team throughout Windows 11.

This is a tough one for me. On the one hand, I respect Microsoft looking at Windows several years ago now, acknowledging some complexities, inconsistencies, and functional redundancies, and then deciding to simplify the experience, knowing that in doing so it will upset many people. But simplification is one of those things that more makes sense in theory than in the real world. And on the other hand, it can lead to functional regressions. The goal should be two-fold: Make the right design decisions and give users a way to get back that one missing feature they need.

And that was the real failure of the initial version of Windows 11: It failed on both counts. This UI was/is simple, yes, but also overly simplistic, and it didn't/doesn't consider how people really use it. The two major sections, Pinned and Recommended, are really just vectors for ads (Crapware preinstalls in the former, "suggested" apps now in the latter). And Microsoft has even burdened the other parts of this UI with what are essentially ads, as seen in the "Account manager" functionality under your profile picture that, among other things, hides actual UI for signing out and locking the screen under additional steps, and the Search highlights screen that appears when you choose Search, which is nothing but Bing- and MSN-fueled content with underlying ads and tracking.

Another issue, and this one is a golden oldie, is that we all use Windows differently, and thus we have different expectations. We've not seen any hard data for this from Microsoft in many years, but there's a big divide here. Some percentage of people (I'm in this camp), pin their most often used apps to the Taskbar and treat Start as a place for launching secondary apps, either by clicking a shortcut icon or with Search. (This is like the Home screen and All apps screen on Android, or Home screen and Library on iOS.) Others go to the Start menu first. Others may do other things, who can say?

The Start menu doesn't ideally help anyone. You can't fully customize it by, say, removing Recommended and only using Pinned, or by going directly to All apps. In short, it forces you to adapt to it, and to work with its limitations, all of which are...