Why can’t Microsoft do simple?

Mar 30th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: Technology

Like most Windows users there are things about Microsoft products I really like and others that I would love nothing better than to take out back of the woodshed and put out of their misery. While I wouldn’t even want to think of blogging without Windows Live Writer I would equally like to dump Vista and Office down the nearest mineshaft.

The thing about Microsoft products is that they have to be big. I don’t just mean big from the space they take up on your hard drive but also the feeling you get when you are using them. I know that the word big isn’t really the right one to use but I can’t think of how best to explain the feeling the one gets when working in an MS product.

Perhaps the best way is with the following graphic which is comparing the interfaces for Microsoft’s new version 4.0 of Windows Search and their competitor Google Desktop Search

As you can see the MS version incorporates everything they think you would want when using the program whereas the one from Google has slimmed down everything so that the important thing - the results - is the principal part of the display.

Simple and Clean.

This is where the consumer market is totally different from the corporate world that Microsoft has positioned itself. Where we go for the simple and clean approach Microsoft is still stuck within the old battleship gray paradigm corporate world of design. It doesn’t matter how many gradients they throw at the interface or good looking icons they put on the toolbars the point is the consumer market is a different beast that Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand.

Microsoft needs to understand the principal of simplicity and right now they don’t.

[graphic borrowed from Download Squad - hope they don't mind ]