Didn’t take long for Greg to spot my post! Excellent! Greg, we should do lunch sometime soon. Greg makes a couple excellent points, but I wanted to clarify them a bit:
Erik is saying that both Google and MSN want to make the computer do the work for you. The difference, Erik says, is that Google does this by taking away features and MSN will do it by adding features.
I see his point, but I can’t help but think of other Microsoft products. What happened to Microsoft Word as features were added for convenience? It became a complicated mess, so feature rich that even a technogeek like me doesn’t know or understand all the features. When I use MS Word, I spend most of my effort ignoring its features so I can get work done. The effort required to exploit its power exceeds the value received.
Greg is 100% right in talking about Microsoft Office… in particular, the next version of Office (version 12… scary that we’re up to 12) doesn’t have that many “new” features. Instead, it has a totally new UI to highlight all the features it already has. Apparently, when they did studies to ask people what they wanted in Office, some astoundingly high number of respondants (like 90%, but don’t rely on that as my memory is likely faulty) listed features that were already in Office — they just didn’t know it as the feature was buried under the advanced tab of a dialog box that you get to via some menu that you have to wait 2 seconds to expand. Silly users.
Here’s the crux of the matter… good design is really, really, really hard. It’s right up there with hard-core scientific research, and typically follows the same methodology to achieve its results. It’s easy to make something that only does a few things with a simple design… case in point, Google Search. You type words into a search box, you get results you want. However, GMail is another beast altogether… it has a radical new design, and some people love it, and some hate it. Working with mail is more complicated, and thus it’s harder to get it just right. And personally, I think they just botched up a great service in Google Groups with the GMail style interface they put on it a year ago… was using groups.google.ca for a while as they hadn’t rolled it out internationally for a bit.
The challenge for Microsoft with the entire Windows Live effort is how do we provide great features to our customers in a design that works. A great design won’t save a feature that doesn’t work (for example, I still can’t just copy an Excel table into Word without Word botching the fonts and whatnot… although cross-app Copy & Paste is the right way to go about it!), and a poor design will bury an otherwise great feature (ask the MSR guys that made the Office Help system how they felt about the paperclip). Melding great features and great design — that’s where we’re going… and again, spend some minutes with the new Image Search on Live.com to see what is possible when you get it right.
PS - Hey Greg, how about you get HaloScan or something set up so I can give you trackbacks to your blog?