ahhh.. now I get it! The fact that YOU know better than me and 100 million of my best friends how I should use the most common UI elements of Windows means that MSFT can (and should) take it away. Just take it away. Not make it easier, not make it more intuitive - just take it away. Delete a core part of your UI, for a tiny bit of real-estate (that the UI can reclaim when not used anyway), because there is some secondary substitute for it, to satisfy someone's idea of UI beauty. Seems like your argument is precisely what this conversations is about... MSFT made an error in that judgment. BTW - I love this comment I just saw (external to this thread) "Windows 8 Metro UI is a beautiful interface that sacrifices functionality for visuals" (http://thetechblock.com/deep-analysis-windows-8-metro-ui/)

yup. This is absolutely the issue - users use the start menu, depend on it, know about it and how to get to it in several ways. The Start menu plays a key role in starting up programs (yeah, but, hey - who really wants to run a program on a computer anyway, right?). Without it they (and, hell, me too) are lost. The first thing I did when I was somewhat forced to buy a new laptop was put in software to create a start menu. Works OK... but Microsquish still takes me to metro every now and then, to my continued consternation. Yes, Redmond, I REALLY DO need to have more than one window open at a time.

Huh? "If Microsoft wants to be a leader again"? The one thing Mr Softee has never done is lead. Sorry... err... the two things Mr. Softee has never done are lead and innovate. Rather... sorry again... the three things Mr. Softee has never done are lead, innovate, and care about customers. Ummm... well... the four things Mr Softee never will do are lead, innovate, care about customers, and have a real vision of what they are trying to accomplish that is viable and valuable. Simply said - Microsoft, under Gates, was superb at linking one crummy (but dominant) OS to everything in the world, and watching their so-called partners to find big markets where they could embrace, extend, and extinguish. Microsoft under Ballmer? Still can't create a product people like, can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag, and is just as obnoxious about trying to control the markets through secondary means (proxy orgs complaining about competition (esp,. Google), manipulating "standards", generally being a bad player). I've lived in the Seattle area (hell, even Redmond) for the better part of 30 years, and one of the proudest things I've done is to NEVER work for this crap company.

I call BS on this, AC. Google is anything other than first in search share in precisely 4 markets. China (yeah - Baidu... you trust them?). Japan (Y! Japan, no longer affiliated with Y! US; Last I looked, Google and Y! Japan were roughly equal), Russia (a partly state-owned company, Yandex, is first... pretty confidence inspiring) and South Korea (Naver is very dominant, Google is in the low single digits there). Google used to be behind in Czech Republic, but now has passed Seznam there. This is *not quite* outside the English Speaking world; in fact, one of the issues in Europe is that Google is so dominat that the European Union is always trying stupid things. Also... have you read Bing's privacy policy? Or Y!'s? The reason people don't like Google's is because it went out of its way to let people know that it was harmonizing its policies across all its properties. Still, it is a better privacy policy than any other major internet company, including showing you what it knows about you and giving you the ability to delete your data or turn off collection of data

First, lets figure out what kind of money Google makes on news. Go to news.google.com. Hmm... no ads. Now search for a news item. Right now, I see Franki Valli is highly trending on Google. Thats as commercial a search term as I can think of, since the reason the old guy with the squeaky voice is on is because of a revival on Broadway. So, I search for it... and... wait for it - no ads. Of course, on other terms, YMMV - but there appears to not be enough money being made to pay for the bandwidth. Now, clearly, to be the search engine of choice, you want to be able to index and respond to queries about everything - at least, anything available. But if Google turns off indexing of French news sites, then they are going to lose *almost nothing* and probably cut net costs marginally. at least in the short term. Even better for Google, and a few media companies - and possibly inevitable (?) - is if Google cuts deals with some French media so that those media sites would refund to Google any cost that Google had to pay the French Govt. Hell, double that cost and charge them that. If I owned a small French media company, I would sign up for that in a heartbeat... and watch the dominant search engine send all the traffic my way, raise my advertising rates, and send the old guard French media out of business. Also, for Google, this would ensure they had the breadth of coverage of topics they need... and another source of revenue of Google.