Stardock recently announced that downloads of Start8, the company's start menu replacement for Microsoft's newest operating system crossed the 3 million mark From Ghacks:

Microsoft decided to ship Windows 8 without a start menu and the main reason for that was probably to get users to use the start screen of the operating system even though Microsoft claimed it was based on telemetry data it collected. While it is certainly possible to use Windows 8 that way after some getting used to time, it is a huge change for veteran users who worked with the start menu their entire computing life.

Companies like Stardock and Sweetlabs and open source projects like Classic Shell jumped in and made their own start menu programs available for Windows 8. All have in common that they add the start button back to the desktop interface of Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. A click on the button displays a menu that looks almost identical to the start menu of the Windows 7 operating system.

 Windows 8 start menu programs are downloaded in record numbers