Khal Weir

As I’m an avid fan of Apple products, some people assume I’m anti-Microsoft… that’s not true, I just dislike using crappy products. Anyone can make a crappy product; Apple’s Mighty Mouse and iPad Case suck, Google Wave was a flawed experiment and there is something very wrong with the way Diet Cherry Coke tastes. Microsoft have done some great work, their recent updates to Bing maps are very impressive and XBOX live is a great platform for online gamers and indie developers. I’m genuinely intrigued by Windows Mobile 7’s interface and was excited by the Courier concept video, but generally Microsoft aren’t major players any more. The problems, as I see it are :

Microsoft have become a huge multi-headed monster.

Without direction and too large to act upon new trends or technology quickly, Microsoft lumbers around playing catchup with the smaller companies in each market it attempts to play in (Zune vs iPod, MSN/Live/Bing vs Google search, Hotmail vs Gmail). Microsoft failed to embrace the web early on and ignored non-enterprise smartphone usage allowing Android and iPhone to dominate that sector. Its evident that Microsoft are so large and have so many divisions that none of then talk to each other, take a look at a Windows PC during a typical work day and count the number of apps sharing the same ‘look and feel’. The Office suite has the hateful ‘ribbon’ UI, which I haven’t seen in any other application, yet there are still traditional toolbars, popup menus and tabbed interfaces. Even when they do have something cool, like Surface or Courier - they move too slowly to get it out into the hands of the public. Surface has revealed in 2007, yet remains an expensive toy for a select few retailers and hotels. In the meantime, cheaper and more sophisticated tech is being developed by competitors. The Courier concept video, was by far, the coolest thing to come out of Redmond in years. A potential iPad challenger, the project was scrapped and apparently lead to J Allard (Chief Experience Officer) leaving Microsoft in frustration.

Legacy

66% of Windows users are running XP, an OS that is approaching its tenth birthday. Ten years in the tech industry is forever and when a large number of you customers haven’t bought something from you in almost a decade, you have a huge problem. This can be attributed to Vista being a disaster, users feeling an update doesn’t offer any real benefits or in some cases software critical to their business doesn’t work on newer versions. With Snow Leopard onwards Apple have dropped support for legacy hardware, they switched to Intel architecture in 2006 so to have the latest OS you need a relatively new computer. This may seem mean, but it allows for rapid progress. Supporting legacy software, convincing and transitioning users from a system they could have been using for over 10 years is probably the biggest challenge facing Microsoft.

Developers, Developers, Developers!

It seems like Microsoft, like Google, focus on the technology than the usability of their products. This shows through the interfaces they produce; Android for example, can achieve great things but the UI is (in my opinion) ugly, awkward to use and lacks the polish of iOS. Without an emphasis on user experience, even a technically great consumer product is likely to suffer. Ask a switcher (PC to Mac) why they switched and most will answer that OSX is easier to use, simply I work faster on a Mac than I do a PC due to great interface design and software. Windows users have long suffered the ‘Start’ menu and ‘Explorer’, which despite improvements made in 7 are still cumbersome and slow to use; these are the kind of interfaces designed by programers, they simply work but aren’t easy to use or well designed. So what should Microsoft do? I don’t care.. I’m a Mac user :) Um, seriously I think competition is good and it would be a shame to see the company that helped bring PCs to the masses fade away. I say they should narrow their focus or divide into smaller companies, hire more UX designers and be bolder. They should replace Steve Ballmer, the guy is a sweaty lunatic not the spokesperson for a multi-billion dollar company; they need to either bring Bill Gates back or find someone with the showmanship of Steve Jobs that can define a culture for the Microsoft of the future.