I find the main reason why I can't find things in the Start menu is because they've been buried in <company name>/<program name>. This seems like an obviously bad idea to me, since I can remember the name of the game I want to play but less frequently who published it.

I had a feeling that this was originally Microsoft's idea although I can't back that up since all I can find now is a newer set of guidelines which suggest not doing this. It's all kind of moot since you can search it in newer versions of Windows anyway.

On the contrary, I think it is something insisted on by MBAs at the software companies themselves. A well-brainwashed MBA thinks in terms of brands: creating brands, growing brands, re-branding, etc. If you have a successful product, the best possible thing you can do with that product is use it to enhance your brand. Good products promote and establish a brand, and then the brand lets you make money selling products whose quality is irrelevant.

Otherwise, you'd be stuck selling products based on their quality and individual value, which is stupid, because the quality of your product depends mostly on people who haven't gone to business school, and is thus completely out of responsible hands.

Therefore, the primary purpose of an installed piece of software is to remind users of its brand, which in most cases is the name of the company or studio that created it.

Whatever the reason, in my experience it is definitely the case that marketing and legal both like to sit in the lap of whoever draws the short stick and has to implement the installer.

I'd have less of a problem if that hierarchy seemed useful. I usually see a <company> folder, and under that, 3 things. <program>, of course; a link to README.txt; and the uninstaller.

Just put <program> at the root and be done with it. I most likely don't have more than the one app from you.

One of the few vendors that I'm rather likely to have multiple products from is Microsoft, and of course they have to be different and delight in having <Microsoft - product name>.

When I still used windows (a very long time ago, before 2002), I spent some time organizing programs in folders and subfolders within the start menu. I had "games", "graphics", "dev", etc, with applications subfolders. It's actually very simple to do (well it was back in win98 at least): right click anywhere in the start menu and "browse here".

You definitely want customization to be simple.

But even still, you should be careful about the mental model you're imposing on your users, especially if they're forced to literally dismantle that model to rearrange things the way they'd like.

Cognitively, it's almost more than twice as much work, once you factor in the uncertainty of messing with things you're not sure you can/should mess with. (Were they pre-arranged a certain way for a reason? Will things break if I move them?)

Which means that people are even more likely to leave your default categorization in place, so it had better be bulletproof.

I tried to do this, but there were a few major hurdles. First, MS Windows left a million poorly categorized things cluttering up my program categorization. Second, when new programs were installed, I had to manually move them from where they put themselves in the start menu. Occasionally, this broke them. And if I didn't think to do it, my list of programs quickly became ugly and unorganized. Third, multiple locations for the start menu folder items (all users vs. the local user) made this really annoying.

Now there is the extra hurdle of having some software installed system wide and some software installed only for the user.. at least in Windows XP when I last tried to do this, I found that even on a single user system that start menu items were in multiple locations.

It was actually simpler than that. Menu items were draggable.

Try launchy, search beats categorisation any time.

Only for people who memorize application names. I bet you feel fine in front of a CLI, too. (Not a knock against, I like Launchy as well.)

Do some time as a tech support, and eventually you'll get a request to help them with "this application, you know, the blue one. With the pictures and stuff?"

Not sure about lunchy, but since it's similar to gnome-do and others - doesn't it search on descriptions or custom aliases too? I never type "thunderbird" for example - it's always "mail" ("ma" actually), or whatever word I associate with the app (this has the added bonus of allowing me to open company's crm via "crap"...)

That's true, but are these people likely to have so many programs in the start menu anyway?

I may be tainted by academia: IT loaded computers with about 150 applications keyserve'd.

Surely academics don't look for the "orange curvy thing" instead of MATLAB, though.

Anybody in the hard sciences was pretty competent, except for a couple of HTML-related issues.

Fine arts, education, sociology, and just students in general, however... And I say that with an art degree, too.

launchy is great, but since I switched to OS X a few years ago the best replacement I've found is quicksilver. It's free and much more responsive, customizable than spotlight.

Quicksilver made OS X useful, for me. It's absolutely fantastic.

Ridiculous - it's a default, nothing more. You can customize it as you see fit, and always could. I find the Mac defaults confusing but that's not because they're bad, it's because I don't use one every day. Turn off all the eye candy and the basic concept hasn't evolved a lot over the last 20 years.

It's been a while since I've used Windows 3.1 but I'm pretty sure you could arrange the icons as you pleased.