From the question and answer session with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at D6:
And next question … Max Levchin from Slide: Asks what the massive audiences Facebook and sites like it have built around Web-based entertainment means for Microsoft’s cloud-computing efforts. Gates notes that whoever succeeds in the cloud-computing office productivity arena must give people the best of both the Web and desktop worlds, not one or the other.
We, like other Web 2.0 app developers, wrestle with feature creep every day. But we believe we are doing the right thing for users by limiting our scope to what we do best. And we like our odds, even against the big guys.
With all due respects, I question Bill’s comment. The reining leader in productivity solutions – Microsoft Office – certainly offers a very powerful toolset. But it reminds me of what they used to tell us in grade school, ‘The average human uses only 15% of their minds capacity’. Well I’m not sure I know of anyone who uses 50% of the capabilities of MS Office. MS Word made WYSIWYG (if you don’t know this one, Google it) popular back in the 80’s. Add formatting and a spellchecker/thesaurus and you have covered probably 70% of common word processing needs. Some of the rest – perhaps what is being referred to as ‘the best of both’ – amounts to a lot of bloat.
Bloatware. The bane of many ‘mature’ products. In fairness, perhaps bloat appears to satisfy a small market niche. Perhaps someone, somewhere decides to start over and ‘do it right this time’. Look at the user interface for MS Office 2007. Apparently someone, somewhere decided that what I had been using for 15 years or so was really bad and counter-intuitive. So they replaced it with Office 2007. I know many have raged on this topic, but as a daily MS Word 2007 user, one year later I still can’t remember how to do even the most basic formatting. How do I vary the space below a paragraph? And why did they take the Yellow Highlighter tool out of PowerPoint? How could I have ever lived before without so many choices? In Word 2007 is it really more intuitive to have 10+ boxes of Fonts at the top of the ‘Home’ page?
It’s not just MS Office that’s gotten bloated. I’m also a long time Quicken user. I was drawn to it because it modeled the familiar checkbook I knew well while adding advantages a computer can easily do: it added numbers without transposition errors, it remembered vendors, accounts and categories, and it was easy to generate reports. However, recent releases of Quicken have gotten a little less obvious. Generating reports for me, a Quicken user for ~15 years, has become a frustrating adventure. What happened? Perhaps some customers somewhere needed more flexibility and so the report generating has become so powerful that generating basic reports has become difficult. For me anyway.
The Web has taught us that single purpose apps that do a few things well offer a viable alternative. There are a number of reasons why. Focus being one of them. But I believe there is another huge backdrop to this whole issue. Users want choice Users want to move freely around from solution to solution without huge switching costs. To the very core of the issue, I think smart users are wise to the strategies that have locked them up in the past. Note the Open Social movement. Note OpenID. Both are situations where user demand has said, in essence, we are not going to embrace your compelling solutions unless we are convinced the providers are all playing in a fair, open marketplace. Put another way, users do not want to be locked into anyone’s productivity suite.
pete
