Windows 7 is "good enough" - and that's a problem

A large portion of the Windows user community has complained -- loudly -- about Windows 8 and its new user interface. People, as individuals or as members of a corporation, have made their displeasure known. They have written articles in trade magazines. They have posted blog entries. They have given presentations. (I suspect that there are anti-Windows-8 videos on YouTube.)

Most folks care more about getting their work done and less about the operating system. They don't want Windows 8, or even Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. They want their invoices, they want their estimates, they want their analyses.

The technology stack of PC hardware, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and specialty software are tools. They are a means to the end, not the end.

Changes to that technology stack, when invisible, are unimportant. An update that fixes a security hole is good, especially when it has no effect on the workflow. After the update, Windows boots as usual, applications run as usual, and the work gets done.

Visible changes, such as removing the "Start" button, affect the workflow. The introduction of "ribbon" menus in Microsoft Office were also met with complaints.

The problem facing Microsoft is that their software (Windows, Office, SQL Server, etc.) has become good enough for use in the workplace. It has been good enough for years, which is why people use old versions.

In the good old days, new versions of software were clearly better. Windows 3.1 was much better than DOS. Windows 95 was better than Windows 3.1. Windows XP was better than Windows 95. People could see the benefit and were willing to move to the later version.

But once software becomes good enough, the benefits of a later version are less clear. Windows Vista was not clearly better than Windows XP. Windows 7 was better than Windows Vista, but perhaps not that much better than Windows XP.

Windows 8 is clearly different from Windows 7 (and Windows XP). But is it better? People perceive Windows XP and Windows 7 as good enough.

Which is ironic, as Microsoft built their empire on software that was good enough. They shipped products when those products were good enough to compete in the market. They improved products to become good enough to deliver revenue.

Microsoft Windows 8 must compete against Windows 7, and Windows 7 is good enough.

Two observations:

The current users of Windows believe their current systems to be good enough, and they are unwilling to change without clear benefits. The features of Windows 8 are insufficient to warrant a change.

A vendor cannot force products upon the market. (This lesson was made earlier with Microsoft "Bob" and IBM "Topview".) Users must see benefits, not merely features, in a product.

Microsoft should recognize "good enough"

The good folks in the tech support group came by today and upgraded my Microsoft Office from version 2007 to version 2010. The experience left me wondering why Microsoft bothered to introduce a new version of MS Office.

I understand the reasons for version 2007. It was a big change. It introduced the "ribbon", a new way of presenting the GUI menus to users. It also introduced the MS OOXML file formats, which made reading (and writing) files for MS Office much easier. Customers, third parties, and I suspect Microsoft, all benefitted.

With version 2010, I don't see the big changes. There *are* changes. Small changes. The non-intuitive "Office button" has been changed to a tab for the ribbon, which makes it closer to the old "File" menu that was the standard for GUI applications. The "skin" has changed its color scheme from silvery-blue to silvery-gray. There is a new menu item called "Team", which apparently lets one use Microsoft's Team Foundation Server to store and share documents. (But no connection to Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Live -- at least none that I can see.)

So I have to wonder: why release a new version? What's in it for Microsoft? More importantly, how do their customers benefit?

And I am not sure that we even need a new version of MS Office.

I suspect that we (in the app industry) have gotten pretty good at word processing, spreadsheets, and note-taking. Improvements beyond fancy skins will be hard to come by. We can do only so much with fonts, justification, and formulas. (In some ways, Intuit has the same problem with Quicken and Quickbooks. Each year they introduce new versions that are advertised as easier to use. Yet accounting has been around for centuries and we don't really need new, imaginative approaches.)

Looking at the situation from another angle: Word processing and spreadsheets, for the most part, are "gen 2" computer applications, and we are moving to "gen 3" apps.

"Gen 1" applications were the centralized, business oriented accounting and inventory apps, where users submitted well-defined transactions to well-defined central databases and received well-defined reports. "Gen 2" applications are the early PC applications with users controlling their own unstructured data and using it for their own (possibly unstructured) analysis. ("Islands of information", in the 1990s term.) Word processing and spreadsheets fit into this category.

The "gen 3" applications of shared data ("web 2.0", social media) have quite different motivators and usages. LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter fall into this group. The earlier applications will not fit into this group, no matter how hard you (or even Google) push.

We're done with serious development of the "gen 2" applications. We've made them "good enough". It's time to move on to new ideas.

Microsoft should recognize that MS Office is good enough. Their history has been one of shipping software when it was deemed "good enough". Yet now that it is a large income stream, they seem determined to maintain it. They need to move on.

Because the rest of us have.