On Tuesday, Microsoft explained why the Windows 7 start menu is now a start screen in Windows 8: no one used it.

On Tuesday, Microsoft explained why the Windows 7 start menu is now a start screen in Windows 8: no one used it.

That may be an exaggeration of sorts, but a blog post by Microsoft explained that the use of the Start menu dipped by 11 percent between Windows Vista and Windows 7, with many specialized Start functions - such as exploring pictures - declining as much as 61 percent.

That's why, as PCMag.com's , the Start menu has bene replaced with a screen full of live tiles that can serve as both as an application launcher as well as widgets containing information.

Microsoft has made an effort to communicate to users and developers changes made to its upcoming Windows 8 OS, via a series of blog posts. Until now, Microsoft has focused on the engineering aspects of the new OS. With the latest post, however, Chaitanya Sareen, the lead program manager on the Microsoft Core Experience team, said that attention would turn to Windows 8's user interface.

In that vein, while the 11 percent decrease in Start menu usage may seem trivial, it was a key indicator for Microsoft's design direction, Sareen wrote.

"While 11 percent may seem like a small number at first, across our hundreds of millions of customers it is eye opening to see such a drop for a universally recognizable element of the Windows interface," Sareen wrote. "We're not talking about some hidden setting that is tweaked by a minority of peoplewe're talking about a fundamental piece of Windows that people are using less and less."

That in turn led to a decision for Microsoft to "evolve" the Start interface.

Instead of navigating through the nested menus within Start, or even searching for apps and documents through the live search function, users began to pin apps to the Start menu or the taskbar for even quicker access. Microsoft's data found that most users (above 40 percent) didn't pin a single app to the Start menu, with steadily declining numbers pinning 1 (20 percent), 2 (15 percent), and so on.

By contrast, the number of pinned apps on the taskbar peaked at three, with 30 percent of the userbase choosing this, Sareen said. Keyboard shortcuts like the Windows button plus the number of the application on the taskbar allow users to quickly launch and switch, Sareen wrote.

"Pinning is also increasing in popularly because you can now also pin websites to your taskbar with IE 9. Fortunately, there's plenty of room on the taskbareven at 1024x768 the taskbar can hold 22 small icons. Add the power of Jump lists, and theoretically, you can also have access to 220 files, folders, and sites at that same resolution!"

In short, the taskbar has evolved to replace the Start menu, and the Start screen has evolved to replace the taskbar, Sareen concluded.