[ranger_danger]

> There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time

Strong disagree, because:

> Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time

I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.

[al_borland]

We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.

[ConceptJunkie]

For people complaining that "Start" isn't a great choice, perhaps there's something better, but I can't think of anything. You need a small word that implies, "Click here to do something or find something." and in that regard, I think "Start" is a good choice.

On the other hand, I think there were few ideas worse than "My Computer", etc., not the least of which is the fact that it took Windows application software about 10 years to get consistently good at handling paths with spaces in their names.

Of course, the worst UI thing Microsoft ever did was hiding file extensions by default. That might be the worst UI decision in all of history.

[al_borland]

> That might be the worst UI decision in all of history.

The Windows 8 touch-first start menu with a hot corner instead of a button, applied to their Server OS, that I assume most accessed through RDP was pretty horrific.

[ranger_danger]

Ok but, were you around during that time? I remember it not helping much at all to tell people what to do.

When Windows 95 first came out, they had to have a giant arrow pointing to the Start menu with an explanation of what that would do: https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg

Then they had a scrolling animation with an arrow and some text ("Click the Start button to begin") that slid in from the right side of the taskbar and pointed right at the Start button.

[al_borland]

I was around, though I wasn’t an adult where I was following the release at the time.

The first computer I used had Windows 3.1, but I never really knew how to use it. I just played some games on it and my dad would have me feed in a stack of floppy disks for him when he had to install something big.

Windows 95 was the first OS I used and explored on my own and made sense to me.