Yesterday afternoon I posted about Amazon releasing the Amazon Fire TV set-top box, but something much more impressive happened around the same time that I’m just getting to review in detail.  What could possibly be more important than yet another TV set-top designed for streaming video and playing games?  The Windows Start Menu!

Ahhh, yes, the Windows Start Menu.  Introduced two decades ago with the launch of Windows 95, and depreciated way back yonder in 2012 upon the release of Windows 8, the Start Menu was an unparalleled staple of computing.  Now, among rampant belly-aching from mouse-and-keyboard aficionados the world over, Microsoft has finally caved under the pressure and resurrected the never-forgotten Start Menu less than two years after its intentional extinction.

All sarcasm aside, the new Start Menu looks rather impressive.  It not only features the most recently accessed applications and pinned applications, as was the case in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but now the famed menu will also feature its own set of Live Tiles.  Live Tiles, for those not in the know, are Microsoft’s 21st century version of icons that are touchable, resizable, and updatable with all sorts of useful in-app information.

In addition to bringing back the Start Menu, Microsoft is unveiling “universal apps” that can run across all devices in the Windows ecosystem (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, Xbox) seamlessly without having to be reprogrammed, and they’re making it possible—for the first time—to run “Modern” style Start Apps in windows on the desktop rather than forcibly full screen for touch-only mode.  This is shown in the image above, on the right hand side where a Modern-style Start App (Mail, in this case) is windowed and overlays a traditional desktop Window of Internet Explorer 11.

No date has been announced for the arrival of the new Start Menu, but it is expected to be within the first half of 2014 and we do already know that the update will be free to existing Windows 8.1 users.

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