22 March 2008

Start?

This is going to be short, but this particular thing drives me crazy. At some point some anti-Microsoft person noticed that to shut down your machine, you click the Start button. They apparently thought this was quite comical, and suddenly everyone on the internet is making fun of Microsoft for being so silly as to put the shutdown option in the Start menu. Now, it's possible the whole Internet is just stupid, or maybe people really do get it and then just keep making fun of Microsoft anyway because it makes them feel good, but just in case it's the former I'm going to clear it up right here. The "Start" on the Start button means start doing something. So, for example, if you want to start to shut down your computer, you would click Start -> Shut Down. You don't click the Start button to start up your computer either, but nobody seems to care about that one. No, it's not a perfect analogy, but when they added the start bar in Windows 95 it was a really big deal UI-wise (No more alt-tab switching!, wink), and it took a decade for somebody to finally complain that apparently they're too slow to figure out how to shutdown their machines.

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