No it does not scale well. You know why? One simple reason: It has a fixed size. The Windows XP application list certainly had its issues, but at least it had one big advantage: It was able to use all your screen space. I have a 24" monitor and on Windows 7, this means the Start menu fill about 1/8th part of the screen. Which means that as soon as you want to find something, you end up needing to do unnecessary clicking and scrolling just to get to your application. ( Assuming you don't know the name of the application of course. ) If it could be resized, I could simply scale it to a size that I am comfortable with ( three quarters of the screen or so ) and avoid all the unnecessary scrolling. The addition of searching was pretty useful, I just don't know why they had to break the "classic" use case of the Start Menu for that. For the rest there really is little difference between the two versions of the Start menu.

So by that same logic, if I sell you my car, you have no problems with me controlling where you drive with that car? And you also do not have any problems with me pushing technologies that allows me to remotely control that car? Or me pushing technologies that allow me to remote control your car even when you did not buy your car from me?