Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Take Me Chrome, Where I Belong…

Published
by
Anders
on September 2, 2008
in Desktop Software, Firefox, Google, Microsoft and Usability
. 0 Comments

When you first encounter something that has been designed just right - the iPhone, Gmail, the Swedish cheese knife and now Google Chrome, you always find yourself wondering what you were thinking using all those other crappy products (I can’t imagine, for example, going back to a regular cell phone, or using an old-skool email client.) And now, after having only played around with Google’s new and long-awaited browser, I knew immediately that it was a keeper. And it’s not just because of all the widely discussed features like separate processes for each tab, and an overall much more modern system architecture. Maybe what I love most is what is not there, which is very much in line with that greatest of design maxims:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Chrome certainly makes that idea manifest. And sure, maybe somethings were taken away that I’d want, like the ability to have a color theme different from the a-bit-too-dark Bloogle blue, or access to all my favorite FireFox add-ons. Oh, and somewhat ironically, I do miss my Google toolbar, particularly the autofill feature. But I expect that will all come in time.

On the lighter side, I just love how Microsoft came out with a statement today saying they weren’t worried about Chrome competing with IE8 - the only thing preventing that from happening is the default install base on Windows PCs - if IE weren’t installed by default on so many machines, their market share would fade away so fast - IE feels like an old jalopy compared to FireFox, and I hate to say this, but FireFox, while still an amazing browser, just feels slow and tired compared to Chrome (though maybe I should give it some time and open up a gazillion tabs and get umpteen applications running and see if Chrome’s garbage collection really is as great as they sat it is) - and one reason it hurts to say that is because so much of what makes Chrome great is thanks to the sweat and hard work and dedication of the people over at Mozilla - Google even made of point saying so in their super cool comic strip about the new browser. I love how they call it a ‘book’ - hey Googlers, did you know that there also are these books out there with, like, text and stuff :)

Microhoo?

Published
by
Anders
on February 1, 2008
in Google, Microsoft and Yahoo
. 2 Comments

So, not unexpectedly, the aging 800-pound gorilla Microsoft recently put in a bid to acquire a big box of Viagra aka Yahoo for 44 some billion dollars, hoping to stave off it’s losing battle against the young-buck 800 lb (8000 lb?) gorilla Google. Call me a pessimist, but even if this deal goes through, I don’t think it’s going to achieve what Microsoft appears to hope it will achieve. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have been leaders in innovation on the web. They’ve both been one step behind Google, mimicking whatever Google does, and rarely leading the way. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the web, for better or worse, would not be what it is today were it not for Google. The only way, then, that any kind of collaboration between Microsoft and Yahoo could be successful–be it the current potential acquisition or something else–it would need to fundamentally reshape the web. The point that I am meanderingly getting to here is that two 800-pound gorillas are not necessarily better than one. Sure, in the short term, they could launch some gigantor campaign with lots of cool free stuff and whiz-bang services or whatever, but ultimately, unless they are truly innovating, they’ll wither away. In fact, one of the main problems Microsoft already is struggling with is that it’s becoming so much of a dinosaur (man, I just seem to love those animal metaphors), that it’s too slow and too unwieldy to get anything done in any reasonable amount of time (one word: Vista) Adding to Microsoft’s bulk with another not-so-small company would not alleviate this (though Ballmer appears to think that acquiring Yahoo would allow eliminating redundancies between the organizations.) So, unless some magical synergy thing happens between the companies should the deal go through, I think it’s just going to be more of the same. That’s not so say that Google will continue to be the leader. In fact, while Microhoo are busy exchanging billions, there are probably a couple young geniuses sitting in some garage (why is it that all computer innovations have to happen in a garage?) developing an idea that will reshape the web as we know it and make this whole acquisition thing irrelevant.

What will happen when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP?

Published
by
Anders
on October 29, 2007
in Microsoft
. 3 Comments

I recall recently seeing a news article about how Microsoft has extended the date when it will stop supporting Windows XP, from January 30th of next year until some undetermined point in the future. Apparently, when the launch of Vista was being planned, Microsoft thought the new OS was going to be such a success that they’d be able to stop supporting the current OS as early as the beginning of 2008. Hah! With many users, such as myself, having no plans whatsoever to ‘upgrade’ to Vista, mostly because the OS seems to be basically a prettified version of XP, with some improved search capabilities, a huge RAM appetite, but with all the same security annoyances as before, akin to what Alan Cooper likes to call badly designed software made to look pretty: a pig with lipstick on it. Ok, I’m being a bit unfair - I’m sure Vista has some interesting innovations. But that becomes not very relevant in the face of what appears to be a general rejection among both individual users and large corporations alike - is there a single Fortune 500 company out there that has made the switch to Vista? And even if there has been (I’d be surprised if there has), I would imagine that the majority have not. So, the more interesting question (or pressing, if you’re Microsoft) to me seems to be: what will happen when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP? Will users:

A: Give in and switch to Vista?

B: Switch to OS X? (Cnet seems to think so)

C: Switch to something like Ubuntu?

D: Stop using computers altogether ;)

Come to think of it, D maybe wouldn’t be so bad. As for me, I’m probably in the B category, but what I think would be most interesting would be if a lot of people picked option C, especially a few large corporations - that could very well spell the death-knell for Microsoft.

Microsoft, the next IBM?

Published
by
Anders
on October 23, 2006
in Microsoft
. 0 Comments

After Microsoft (finally) released IE7 the other day, I felt compelled to at least download and play around with the thing. In many ways, IE7 is a completely acceptable browser - it has the now-mandatory tabs, and allows for adding custom widgets, etc. But what really is the most telling about IE7 is that it lacks any features or overall UX design that is superior to Mozilla browsers - ok, one nice little detail - the new tab button that appears next to existing tabs, which allows for adding tabs with a single click - of course, FireFox can easily be customized to support that. Worse, and I almost think this should be borderline embarrassing to Microsoft, is that it took them this long to deliver a browser that just barely keeps up with the competition - and that, I think, really is what is at the core of Microsoft’s troubles - they move soooo slowly, and even when moving at that dinosaur’s pace, they’re still not innovating. Makes me wonder if 10 years from now (or maybe less), Microsoft will have become the next IBM - a big but mostly irrelevant old-world corporation who has an increasingly smaller share of the technology market. Once browsers apps become more mature than their desktop equivalents in terms of power and sophistication, most people will be doing all their wordprocessing and photoshopping and what-not online, while desktop apps will become sort of like mainframes - catering only to professionals and corporations (as in using desktop apps is something you only do at the office), sort of like what IBM does now….

MS Vista vs Google OS

Published
by
Anders
on October 4, 2006
in Google, Microsoft and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

So I’m sitting here tooling around with the new features of the Google personalized homepage (last time I visited, they did not have the tab feature, for example), and finding myself not at all thinking about Google; I’m thinking about Microsoft, more specifically their forthcoming operating system, which legend has it is to be released sometime in 2007. Every time I turn around, I seem to be discovering and trying out some new feature or product released by Google, but with Microsoft, I mostly find myself reading about them, as in that it’s either been delayed, or that there is some security issue. On the one hand, I’m really comparing apples (eh, not to be confused with Apples) and oranges here - while Google is churning out one little app after another, what Microsoft is working on is the far more extensive effort of developing an operating system, of building the environment in which apps like Google’s can live. But at the same time, I have to wonder how all this would be different if the tables were turned…

Imagine for a moment that it is Google who is busy working on a new operating system while Microsoft is developing a bunch of tiny web-apps. (Btw, some of the apps Google is producing are quickly becoming less and less tiny, like the enterprise version of Gmail, which essentialy is a repackaged version of what they’ve been using internally - I am guessing we’ll be seeing more of their internal tools, such as their internal Help Desk system, also being made publicly available before too long.) My guess is that the process of implementing a Google OS would be approached very similarly to how Linux was created, with an initial seed kernel created by Linus Brin and Larry Torvalds (ha ha), followed by an open-sourcish approach, where the OS essentially is allowed to grow out in the open (as opposed to behind closed doors in Redmond) - a continaul flow of tiny improvements and design changes.

But that would only be the beginning of the differences. I can not imagine a Google OS that is not a fundamental departure from any of the major operating systems in use today. For starters, I would assume that the entire notion of a browser would vanish. In other words, once you boot up, if a network can be found, LAN, WAN, WiFi, whatever, you are online (OSX already does this to a degree.) In other words, it will be considered the default state of the operating system (akin to a UNIX terminal, which is never anything more than a network node), rather than a special state. Unfortunately, Microsoft Live notwithstanding, from my own tests of Vista, it seems that the new MS OS will continue to treat being on a network as a special state. No, I’m not talking about being on a local network (MS’s OS’s have handled that quite well since NT), I’m talking about full connectivity. So what’s the big deal about this distinction? Well, going back to what I mentioned earlier about the browser vanishing, what this means is that the operating system and what we currently think of as a standards-based browser would be completely fused. No more launching Firefox or whatever to get to Amazon or eBay or what-not. When the operating system boots up, you’d be greeted with, among other things, a big fat text field (yes, only one text field for URLs, searches, commands, everything - and I should actually credit my good friend Liz, for that idea), where you type in whatever it is you want to do or find or run or whatever. Of course, you wouldn’t want to have to type in things you do all the time, which brings us back to that personalized Google homepage. Functioning very similarly to a personalized homepage, the desktop keeps track of all your recent activities, your favorite locations, applications, etc. And better yet, as you work, all your data, and all your preferences would be stored in a central location, so that when you’re logging in to your computer, it really doesn’t matter what computer you’re logging in to - all your personalizations would be available to you as long as you are able to be online - and for those situations where you can’t get a connection, your personal machine would have lots and lots of storage, and automatically keep a synchronized local version of your data and preferences, doubling also as a continual backup system. But all these features would be emergent in a Google OS - in other words, they would not all be available right away, but would appear piecemeal, which brings us back to the core difference between the fundamental philosophies underlying how Google (and other Web 2.0 folk, like 37s or Flickr) approach design - rather than trying to get everything perfect before releasing something (which is what Microsoft is trying to do with Vista, and which we all know can never happen), the approach is to release something when it is good enough, when people can start to use it and react to it, and then keep adding to it. That’s the very evolutionary approach that I think Microsoft needs to turn to, or (and forgive me for sounding all doomsdayish here), Microsoft may not be releasing many more operating systems after Vista, because I think operating systems like we know them today will become virtually irrelevant before too long.

Bagging grocerices and software feature bloat

Published
by
Anders
on August 21, 2005
in Microsoft and Usability
. Closed

So I’m standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods on Union Square in New York City, where they’ve basically got long lines from open until close, and then I finally get to the always-friendly cashier, who rings up my groceries, and then proceeds to bag them. Having lived much of my life in Europe, it’s always struck me as unfortunate that, in most U.S. supermarkets, cashiers or someone assisting them, will provide grocery bags and bag your groceries for you, while in Europe (at least in Stockholm, Berlin, and Brussells), you will almost certainly have to bag your own groceries, as well as either bring your own bag, or pay extra for supermarkets bags. I think the reasons for this difference is likely tied to all kinds of cultural, sociological, and market factors, but, ultimately, I think customers are done a disservice by being provided this extra “free” service. Aside from coming home to discover that your canned preserves were placed on top of your bananas, having cashiers do the bagging actually slows down lines, which means more cashiers or assistants need to be hired, which means more overhead. And then, of course, there is the environmental side to the equation—by requiring customers to bag their own groceries and charging them for supermarket bags, you encourage that they bring their own bags (this is very common in Stockholm.) I usually bring my own bag when I go to Whole Foods, and even at this generally progressive establishment, I often get a confused look by the cashiers who often are not quite sure what to do with this alien variable that has been inserted into their process.

In the world of user experience design, I would call the cashier-bags-groceries feature an example of feature bloat. One of the more notoriously feature-bloated applications is MS Word. While users of this app may not be familiar with this term, they have almost certainly experienced its detriments, which basically takes the form of wading through all kinds of features you either never use or don’t really understand (when did you last do a mail merge?) to get to the 10% or so of the features that you use all the time. The origin of feature bloat are slightly less complex than the cashiers doing the bagging in supermarkets, but may be driven by similar forces. They mostly have to do with justifying a new version of the application every few years. Just like software marketers need new exciting-sounding features that they can splash across their ads, supermarkets need to sell convenience, which often can take the shape of giving customers things they never really asked for but which it is expected will help selling the product. And this really is at the core of the issue giving users stuff they never really explicitly asked for (Do you really think a customer in a supermarket just one day refused to bag their own groceries, and so supermarket owners were forced to start bagging them? Ok, I jest, but you get my point.) In the world of software development, every design decision implies some form of trade-off; you get one thing, you are likely giving up something else. By giving users features they haven’t explicitly asked for, they may need to either cut corners elsewhere or completely forego features that may be more important to them. In MS Word, most users just want to write whatever they need to write and print it or email it or whatever and be done with it; in supermarkets, customers just want to get their groceries and get out of there. Aware of this issue, Microsoft has in recent versions begun to for the first time reduce the number of features in MS Word; some U.S. supermarkets have actually also begun to (inadvertently?) also address the issue by having self-serve checkouts (there is one at the Kmart at Astor Place in NYC), which require customers to bag their own groceries, but is also churning up a host of new user experience issues relating to the touch screens and other devices used when doing a self-serve checkout, but I’ll save that for another posting…