“Seeing the Future” at Minimal Mac 
Patrick Rhone’s put down an insightful post over at Minimal Mac on how frustrating it is to see Microsoft floundering in its implementation of what ought to be game-changing technologies, and turning them, such as in the case of Kinect, into little more than toys, or, I might add, such as in the case of the ill-fated Courier tablet, never even letting products see the light of day.
Patrick juxtaposes this with Apple’s product development decisions, which have ushered in a new era in the way technology interacts with our lives, asking why Microsoft can’t do the same. It’s hard to disagree.
Many parts of Apple’s design process can be emulated, and a lot of companies (including Microsoft) seem to be trying. Extraordinary attention to detail, the combination of purposeful restraint and open-ended creativity in product development, the commitment to sensible simplicity, to completeness in design — these things make for the process that makes Apple products stand apart. But Apple’s ability to leave the past behind is ultimately what frees them to create the society-shifting products that they do.
Dizziness sets in if I run down a mental list of Apple hardware and software that I’ve had in my young life, all now marooned in the Sea of Obsolescence, piled on the shores of No-Longer-Supported Isle. It’s frustrating to think of the waste of perfectly useful and usable products predictably out-cycled by innovation, but that’s the unfortunate nature of a technological revolution.
Somehow, it seems like Microsoft doesn’t get this, or at least wants to stem back the tide. They’re slow to drop even the extremes of legacy support, and do it only as it becomes completely unavoidable, when the pain of continuing on with that old baggage becomes too much to bear.
An example is their recent encouragement that people finally abandon IE6. When they finally announced the “IE6 Countdown” effort, there was much rejoicing amongst those who cared about innovation in web media, but Microsoft only did even this small thing after 10 years of IE6 and a massive build-up of outcry. And consider that this was not just any 10 years, but 10 years during the thickest part of the internet revolution so far, giving it an effect of a much longer period. (Not to mention that their later browsers have standards compliance issues as well, making web innovation even more difficult than if they’d just quit the game all-together.)
This scenario seems to be repeated over and over, suggesting the pattern at Microsoft is to look back at how to leverage legacy rather than looking forward at how to maximise future impact. It suggests that when Microsoft’s teams finally make a clean slate product, at some point someone’s strongest impulse is to start copying over from the old chalkboard as much as will fit, and then to toss out the slate if it can’t fit the contents of the old chalkboard within its clean, new edges.
I don’t say these things with any sort of schadenfreude for Microsoft. To tell the truth, yes, I hated Microsoft in the 1990’s. I was a Mac fanatic to the core through those years when it looked like Apple was going to go belly up. I designed software on both Mac and Windows platforms (this was back in my high school / ReaCh Software days), and ultimately, Apple was rescued by that bailout from Microsoft, if we want to call it that, so for that I was and am grateful (and maybe just a little resentful.) But that’s old history.
I’d honestly love to see a modern Microsoft innovating and making phenomenal products that end up putting Apple to shame.
In the end, we’d all benefit from more competition at the “complete design” level that Apple seems to pretty well monopolize at this point. Microsoft already has the brains and the ideas to do it. But they need the vision and the courage to commit to it. Scary stuff. I bet we’d be surprised how much fear rules a lot of the strategy and development decisions at Microsoft. It’s the only thing that, to me, makes sense of how a company with that amount of resources can keep making the missteps it does.
So, here’s hoping somewhere over at Redmond, someone has a breakthrough with their therapist, and here’s hoping that breakthrough snowballs into us all getting gifted a better future.
