Archive for June 2nd, 2008

No, not really. In their efforts to be seen as “innovators”, I think Microsoft are just trying too hard. That’s not to say that Microsoft cannot innovate - you only need to look at XBox Live for a great example of that. This is what irks me so much about Windows. Microsoft has the resources to hire the best minds on the planet. They could produce truly ground-breaking products, and in fact they do produce some great things (XBox, Office, Exchange etc.), but they just don’t seem to be able to build a really intuitive OS.

So, the next big thing is touch screens, or so Microsoft seem to think anyway. There’s nothing new about touch screen technology. I was writing multimedia software for touch screen systems a decade ago - it didn’t take off then, and I’m pretty sure it won’t take off now. There’s nothing new about the multi-touch interface that Microsoft have demonstrated as being part of Windows 7 either, after all, Apple did it on the iPhone 18 months ago. And whilst on a small gadget touch works fine, are people really going to want to sit with their arms outstretched interfacing with their main computer screen for any length of time? So, you can zoom in on a photo with two hands - I can do it right now with one flick of the wheel on my mouse. I can move items on the screen quickly and precisely with my mouse - why would I want to work slower and use a touch screen?

A client came for a meeting a couple of weeks ago and pulled out a Panasonic Toughbook laptop with a touch screen running Windows XP. The screen was covered in finger grease and it was difficult to see anything clearly. I am hugely obsessive about having a clean screen, and I hate (with a vengeance) people touching my screens. Why would I ever want to defile my nice clean, crisp display with muck from my fingers? Presumably in the Windows 7 world of the future, offices will be filled with workers furiously polishing away the remnants of their lunchtime sandwich so that they can actually see the spreadsheet they’re working on. Woe betide the office drone that misses that all important figure because it was hidden behind a lump of Cathedral City.

Microsoft has tried to launch touch screens on the mass computing market before with Windows Tablet edition. The tablet PCs have been quite literally staying on the shelves. Most computer stores don’t even stock them anymore. That’s not to say they don’t have their place in the market, because they do, but touch screen just isn’t mainstream, and I’m not convinced it ever will be.

I have spoken elsewhere in my blog about Microsoft Surface, which looks like an awesome application of touch and wireless technology, and a real innovation, but again it’s a product that is intended for specific business applications, not the mainstream home and business computer market.

Keyboards and mice have evolved and stuck because they are a great way to interface with a computer. I don’t want to touch my screen, I don’t want to wave at it, I don’t want to talk to my computer and I don’t want it to talk to me.

The obvious contrast I must draw as a Mac user, is the latest version of OS X. It includes a number of things that help me to work faster (and I certainly don’t imply that these are all Apple innovations - just great time-saving features):

Spaces: borrowed from the UNIX/Linux world, the ability to have multiple virtual desktops and switch between them, enables me to save time flicking between applications. Couple this feature with the existing Expose technology found in OS X and you have rapid application switching that doesn’t get in your way.

Time Machine: sheer genius. Plug in an external hard drive, switch it on and your computer is backed up. Every time you change a file it saves a backup. Need to find a lost file? Just flick back through time, or even better use the fantastic spotlight search to find it ultra fast.

Coverflow: browse your documents with actual previews instead of icons. This saves soooo much time when looking for particular files.

Quick View: click on a file, press the spacebar and get an immediate preview. No need to wait for Word, or Acrobat to load.

These are real time-saving features that help me get my work done faster. No doubt Microsoft will ultimately copy these, and so they should - every OS should have these features - but, why could they not come up with some ideas of their own? What did Vista bring in terms of real time-saving benefits? All my experience with Vista (which is considerable given that I support it on the network) is that it makes most tasks slower. Other things simply don’t work properly (zip files, time remaining indicators anybody?). The worst snag in Vista of all is that the Remote Desktop application will refuse to connect to a Windows 2003 server by default. What???

Vista has been a huge flop. I have no doubt it will get better as the service packs come out, just as XP did, but how will anyone have any confidence in the product when Microsoft are clearly more interested in bringing out the next version, which will require yet more hardware upgrades.

I recently sold my venerable Apple G4 PowerMac to my brother. It boasts a whopping 1GHz G4 processor, and is more than 5 years old. Here’s the list of hardware I had to upgrade to run the very latest version of OS X:

Nothing.

Apple are not without their own faults. I’m not a zealot, and I don’t worship at the church of Mac, I just like my computer to allow me to do my work without getting in the way.  Microsoft have it much harder than Apple in that they have to make an OS that supports myriad combinations of hardware, but they showed with XP SP2 that they were making real progress. Vista has been a step backward as far as I’m concerned, and if they continue chasing this touch screen gimmick then they will keep losing market share to Apple and Linux.

Even if you don’t like Apple, why not treat your excellent PC hardware to an excellent OS: Ubuntu. Look at the quality of the interface, the stability, the way it just works, and then remember that this is open source, built by people who really care, in their own time for no financial reward. And… it’s better than Vista. Sure, some people need software that specifically runs on Windows, but your average computer user (web, email, office) will do just fine with Ubuntu. It runs on older machines quite happily, is more secure than Windows, and it’s free.

Come on Microsoft, you can do better.