That makes the usability and performance of the windows start menu even more embarrassing.

The decline of Windows as a user facing product is amazing, especially as they are really good at developing things they care about. The “back of house” guts of Windows has improved alot, for example. They should just have a cartoon Bill Gates pop up like clippy and flip you the bird at this point.

Much worse is that the search function built into the start menu has been broken in different ways in even major release of Windows since XP, including Server builds.

It has both indexing failures and multi-day performance issues for mere kilobytes of text!

People believing it says something about the start menu

hey, haven't seen that one in the wild for a little bit :-D https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

The comic artist seems pretty ignorant to think that it’s not meaningful.

What falsehoods people believe and spread about a particular topic is an excellent way to tell what the public opinion is on something.

Consider spreading a falsehood about Boeing QA getting bonuses based on number of passed planes vs the same falsehood about Airbus. If the Boeing one spreads like wildfire, it tells you that Boeing has a terrible track record of safety and that it’s completely believable.

Back to the start menu. It should be a complete embarrassment to MSFT SWEs that people even think the start menu performance is so bad that it could be implemented in electron.

In summary: what lies spread easily is an amazing signal on public perception. The SMBC comic is dumb.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It's less meaningful than you think. Widespread prejudice does give you signal on public sentiment, but it doesn't give you much signal on whether the prejudice happens to coincide with reality or not, compared to other methods. People should be open to having their prejudices corrected by more relevant information.

We’re talking about new prejudices, not old.

React Native, not Electron. Though it is slower than it was

That's even more damning that they can't dogfood their own GUI toolkits for the primary UI of their own OS.

The Start menu is React Native, but Outlook is now an Electron app.