Though Microsoft’s new Windows head, Julie Larson-Green, would have us believe users are acclimating to navigating Windows 8 despite the absent Start menu, startup Pokki — one of many companies that has developed an add-on Start menu for the OS — begs to differ: The company claims its homegrown Windows 8 menu has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and customers are using it on average 10 times per day.
“In the six weeks following the launch of Windows 8, Pokki itself saw half a million downloads of our Start menu, Stardock sold tens of thousands of copies of Start8, and it took only 30 days for 30 different Start menu replacements to come to market,” according to a new Pokki blog entry. “All of which is early proof of our original hypothesis that people need, want, and use the Start menu more than ever.”
To recap, Microsoft said its decision to kill the Start menu in Windows 8, which is fashioned for both traditional PCs and tablets, was multifaceted: The company claimed that few people actually used the Start menu, the growing size of menus was becoming a logistical problem, modern UI apps and the classic Start menu don’t have a way to talk to each other, and most crucial, the old Start menu wasn’t optimized for touch interfaces.