the windows is in front of them to keep them grouped together.
YOU CAN CHANGE THE NAME IF YOU WANT.
noobs.
I’m not sure if it’s really fair of some commenters to be comparing the search in Vista’s start menu (or any search) to the old-style command line.
The problem with command lines is that they aren’t intelligent, they don’t understand synonyms, they can’t detect a typo, and you have to get the grammar absolutely correct. And if you’re typing a really long command and screw it up, you often have to retype the whole thing or hit the arrow keys 56 times.
Search is not the same thing. Think about Google. It corrects your typos. It doesn’t care about grammar. You don’t have to retype your query if you screwed up. It’s not very good at context or synonyms yet, but then again neither is a menu.
I think that a lot of UI nuts are stuck on stupid. Not to say that they are stupid, but they’re obsessed with the stupidest possible user, the lowest common denominator, the great-grandma who types with one finger, squints at 640x480 resolution, still looks for the “any” key, can’t figure out the filesystem, and would give up in exasperation if they had to use a command line.
Fine, we still have those users, but they’re a dying breed. We can’t make any technological progress by designing everything for people who we think are afraid to type “cal” to look for the calendar. WIMP is great, but as information density grows, it just doesn’t scale, as the XP Start Menu clearly proved.
Some tools like Launchy are actually very smart and can figure out that when you typed “msw” you were actually searching for “Microsoft Office Word 2003”, or that “ps” is “Adobe Photoshop CS2”. Does the Vista Start Menu search do this? Personally I think that’s critical.
It seems to me the ability to disambiguate between a slew of generic applications Microsoft provides with the OS, and some particular one I choose to use is useful. May we can make the assumption that those icons all refer to microsoft programs if we haven’t otherwise installed and configured other programs, but who knows…maybe they launch the configured “system default” application. There probably needs to be some continium of information…maybe through a popup or simply in a light grey postfix, derived from the executable’s company/author metadata. I think getting rid of all branding could possibly be counter-intuitive. For example, I really do want to know which mail client is Microsoft’s so that i can be sure to stay away from it.