Never. That means you don't have to do so in Windows 8 with the start screen either. Except the Start Screen does provide more functionality than the start menu but that's a discussion for another day.
In Windows 8 your work flow is all in all almost identical to your work flow in Windows 7. You can still pin your most used programs to the taskbar meaning you can largely avoid even opening the start screen for launching apps since 99% of the time you can just click the ones you've pinned to the taskbar.
Also, multi-monitor support in win8 is so much better than on win7. There are plenty of non-metro feature additions or improvements in win8 that make using it a better experience.
I felt like I was using Windows 8 "wrong" because I was throwing away the start screen after boot and not coming back to it.
But then, you get home and decide you need to get some real work done so you plop that "tablet" back into the laptop and you have a full fledged laptop again. You can even hook it up into a multi monitor setup or whatever you want. Now get to work!
I think that will be really cool. One computer for both fun and work.
If that's what Microsoft is betting on, I'd be concerned for their overall strategy.
Just like someone above mentioned, Microsoft needs to jump first. Windows 8 is more extreme, but a similar example is that the release of Vista made 4GB of RAM become the defacto standard for laptops without raising price.
I'm sure this new hardware will be more expensive, but I would predict that less than a year after it's out, the prices will stabilize such that a split-screen laptop will cost the same as a normal one with the same specs would have a year or 2 ago.
"Screens that support color? Hardly anyone has one of those."
I'm not saying that splitting the screen from the laptop is not cool, as I'm no Luddite! I'm merely remarking on the fact that Windows 8 seems to have been designed for the next generation of hardware, but there is no guarantees that this sort of hardware will be adopted by a large proportion of the market any time soon.
What does he even do in metro? Why does he keep returning to it? I've been working in windows 8 for months, and I'm only on the start screen after my computer boots up.
I can't help but wonder if he actually hates windows 8 as much as he sounds like he does, or if he's using link bait for page views.
The only noteworthy comment he made was this one:
> The biggest problem with Windows 8 is that it wasn’t born out of a need or demand.
Too bad that has little to do with what the rest of the article is actually about.