Reply To: The Random Post Thread (Game Potential)
To me, one of the big issues in the Microsoft versus Apple debate is that MS’s perspective is clearly on the big connected system of their software, and how to make it most productive in sales terms. The end user and her irritating personal preferences is not that interesting to them; they sell their stuff based on the number of bells & whistles it has, and on the virtues of its connectivity.
I have a (Western) beef with them because I really used to love WordPerfect as a word processing tool. It was developed to mimic natural writing habits, so it was extremely good at starting people out, then allowing them (if they wanted to) to pull in the technical stuff. You wouldn’t see any codes unless you WANTED to fiddle with codes. You could build a table very intuitively, do desktop document formatting stuff in a clear and easy way, etc. etc.
But everywhere I worked, Word was replacing WordPerfect because it worked with Excel, it worked with Access, it worked with PowerPoint. And yet it was clunky, it was designed somewhere in the confusing space between the stupid novice and the smart power user, and I found I couldn’t work on it for more than an hour or so without starting to curse like a pirate.
So I think the ruthless thing that is so obvious in their business model is very similar to the way they ignore user comfort & clarity within the design of their software packages. In both cases, system characteristics and profit are their priorities.
By contrast, Mac is nothing if not designed with the needs and comfort of the user in mind. The immortal iPod is the perfect expression of that — if only Gates & Ballmer & Co. hadn’t been so damn good at developing that business model when they did, today we might see the domination of the personal computer field by Apple in the same way they dominate other IT product categories.