Steve Jobs, co owner of Apple Computers, visited Xerox in 1979 and saw a demonstration of the Alto. He instantly realised that graphical interfaces controlled by a mouse are superior to text based interfaces controlled by keys, and he rushed back to Apple saying he had seen the future and they needed to get working on it right away.
The engineers at Xerox were excited by the Alto project, but they didn't understand its potential. By the time Xerox released the Star 8010 in 1981, Apple were already hard at work on their own GUI based computer. When Steve Jobs saw the new Xerox machine he instantly knew Xerox had dropped the ball. The computer's mouse couldn't move diagonally, it didn't have overlapping windows, nor even dialogue boxes, and its operating system still revolved around keyboard commands. Apple were working on something far more revolutionary, and it took them many years and many millions of dollars to perfect the technology. In a sense the The development of the GUI made the Apple Mac popular for Graphical Desktop Publishing, but the IBM PC clone was still able to maintain market dominance. Meanwhile Microsoft worked on a GUI of it's own, and in 1985 it released an add-on to MSDOS called 'Windows 1.0'. However, this first version of Windows came with no useful compatible applications and its general functionality was limited by legal challenges from Apple (eg no overlapping windows). After defeating the law suites (Bill Gates defended them with the claim “hey you copied from Xerox”) it was able to release the much improved Windows 2.0 in 1987. That same year, two important programs written to work with Windows 2.0 were released: Microsoft Excel and Desktop Publisher Aldus PageMaker (the latter had previously only been available on the Apple Mac). Some computer historians date the release of PageMaker, the first appearance of a significant and non-Microsoft application for Windows, as the beginning of the success of Windows.Xerox engineers had just stumbled across a very roughly drawn picture of the future, and Steve Jobs was the genius visionary who screamed eureka the instant he saw it, and then dedicated himself and his company to making it a reality. In 1983 Apple finally released their first GUI based computer. Unfortunately the "Lisa" computer was an expensive machine targeted at business and academia which proved to be a commercial failure. A year later Apple launched their successful "Macintosh" computer for consumers. Although Apple remained a niche player, it should be remembered that the IBM PC was a sort of meteor that hit the earth and wiped all life, Apple was essentially the single survivor of this dramatic evolutionary event.
Before GUIs, users relied on complicated key combinations and typed commands to control computers. Steve Jobs focused on bringing computers to the masses by making them friendly, fun and easy to use - and he succeeded.
In 1985, before the success of the Macintosh was clear, Apple's board of directors forced 30 year old Steve Jobs to resign. The Lisa had failed, Apple was loosing ground in word-processing, there had been disagreements over costs and the hyperactive Jobs had become very hard to work with. In 1997 Apple brought Jobs back when it purchased NeXT.
1984 Apple Macintosh, first popular GUI computer:
1984 Mac GUI:
1987 Windows 2.0
It is interesting to compare the GUIs at this stage.
Windows could run applications side by side and had minimization and maximization buttons. Although the $10k Apple Lisa supported multiple applications, up until Operating System 7 in 1991 the Macintosh could only run one application at a time (like the early iPhone - no multitasking).
Apple applications shared a common menu bar in a fixed location at the top of the screen - a design which remains today. Windows, by contrast, demanded each window maintain its own interface. The Apple approach made sense at the time, especially on a machine that can only run one process at a time. In future years, however, it has suffered two major disadvantages. First, applications running in a window on a big screen could appear a long way from their menu bar. Second, applications had reduced interface flexibility, eg advent of 'Skins' and the new Office 2007 Menu system. Today, the Microsoft approach is the standard used by non Apple GUIs such as Linux etc.
Apple used the common menu bar at the top of the window to launch applications, but Microsoft instead chose a 'Program Manger' application that contained icon shortcuts to programs and other folders. The Microsoft approach allowed for the hierarchical organisation of large numbers of applications / shortcuts (which was not possible with the simple Apple Menu), but it also contributed to clutter and complexity as the user opened folder after folder in search of his target. In 1995 Microsoft completely replaced the Program Manger technique with the 'Start Menu'.
Apple adopted a friendly icon based approach to browsing the hard drive but Windows employed a vertical tree based application called File Manager. The vertical tree approach is much more effective, but novice computer users often struggle to understand it. This difference is one of many that reflects a divergence of design philosophy in those early days - while Steve Jobs of Apple concentrated on making his system friendly and aesthetic, Bill Gates and the brilliant geeky programmers living on caffeine at Microsoft concentrated on power and technicalities.
To see the difference in aesthetic design compare two early text editor applications from Apple and Microsoft.
Steve Jobs named his first computer after his daughter Lisa because it was so easy to use. Looking at the screenshot above one wonders if Bill Gates could have used the same name for Windows 1.0, not because it was child’s play to use, but rather because it looked as if Steve's daughter ran his graphic design.
1988 NeXT GUI with 3D looking Windows and Icons
Both IBM PC Hardware and the Microsoft Windows GUI suffered one huge disadvantage compared to the Macintosh – they needed to retain complete backwards compatibility with older software. As a result it wasn’t until the advent of the powerful Intel 386 processor and the release of Windows 3.0 that Microsoft’s GUI really took off.
1990 Windows 3.0
1991 Apple’s System 7
1992 Microsoft Windows 3.11
Of course, the popularity of Windows went hand in hand with the availability of Windows applications. Perhaps Microsoft’s most remarkable feat was to leverage the GUI skills acquired whilst developing Windows in the production of Spreadsheets and Word Processors.
The screenshot below shows the first version of Excel released in 1987 for Windows 2.0 which completely outclassed the market leading Lotus123 spreadsheet both in terms of GUI and core functionality. Almost overnight Lotus started loosing market share and within a few years it was no more than a memory. Lotus was the largest software company in the world and the spreadsheet was the most complex and profitable program around. Yet Microsoft steamrolled right over it with the first release. Remarkable.
1987 Excel 2.0 for Windows
1988 Excel 2.1. The start of the grey borders and 3D effect.
1991 Excel 3.0. The first application to use a modern toolbar
By contrast, in 1991 Word Perfect released Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS and Word Perfect 5.1 for Windows. Word Perfect was the biggest application of it's day, but its GUI version was both late to market and outclassed by Word. The screen shot below shows the famous but complicated 'Reveal Codes' feature which was rendered essentially obsolete by WYSIWYG editing.
1991 & 1992 Word Perfect
The table below shows the market share of Microsoft Word relative to its competitors. By 1993 WordPerfect was beaten, by 1997 Microsoft had captured a greater than 90% market share.
The Macintosh version of Word took market share away from competitors such as MacWrite even more quickly and more decisively. This is interesting because it’s inconsistent with the often repeated theory that Microsoft’s dominance stemmed only from insider knowledge of the underlying platform operating system. Insider knowledge was no help to Apple, first their MacWrite word processor's market share was burned by Word Perfect, then it was vaporised by MS Word.
Although Windows 3.1 was extremely popular it’s MSDOS heritage left it with several major flaws, not least of which was stability. For business users, who required less compatibility with legacy applications, especially games, Microsoft offered an alternative operating system called 'Windows NT' (Windows NT was released in July 1993 with a GUI very like regular Windows. Originally it was a cross platform 32 bit operating system, but the non Intel versions never caught on).
In 1995 Microsoft released an enormous upgrade that finally gave the home user a stable sophisticated modern mostly 32 bit operating system with protected memory and preemptive multitasking (features that would take another seven years to reach the Apple Mac).
As well as huge under the hood improvements Windows 95 offered a radical new GUI. Microsoft introduced the 'Task Bar' which accomplished three things:
(1) The prominent 'Start Menu' at the far left of the Task Bar simplified launching programs or accessing OS features such as Control Panel. Instead of hunting for icons on the Desktop or in Program Manager all features were available in one easy to find place. Microsoft were proud of the Start Menu and it featured heavily in their advertising campaigns for Windows 95. Although the Start Menu has been a great success, novice users have never found it as easy to customize or navigate as the desktop and often continue to store some programs or documents there.
(2) Most early GUIs, including ones from Apple and Microsoft, minimized running programs to icons on the desktop where they could be lost amongst similar looking icons, or hidden from view by windows running on top of them. The task bar rectified this problem by putting all running programs into one highly visible place.
(3) The Task Bar also featured a system tray where users could see the clock and system applications.
Today the task bar with start menu, running applications and system tray is the standard used by both the latest Microsoft & Linux GUIs. It’s notable that while Microsoft was prepared to completely junk its Program Manager interface and replace it with a start menu & task bar, Apple only reluctantly and gradually added a task bar to their system over the next several years. Such a bold design decision testifies to Microsoft's famously aggressive tendancy to innovate, assimilate, copy and redesign which was surely one of the principle factors behind the company's meteoric rise during the 1980s and 1990s.
Such extreme willingness to change, such open-mindedness and avoidance of dogma and ideology, is highly unusual. For example, in a 1983 Television program called the Apple Macintosh Dating Game, Bill Gates is asked by Steve Jobs "Will Macintosh become the third industry standard?" Bill Gates answers: "To create a new standard it takes something that is not just a little bit different, it takes something that is really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh is of all the machines I have ever seen the only one that meets that standard." What comes across in that TV program is the total intellectual honesty of the young geeky Bill Gates, it's not about money or Microsoft, it's about computers. That young carefree Bill Gates was the sort of person who believed in nothing, if you could prove him wrong he would change, he had no ego and all that mattered was the product. These days Microsoft has lost that early association with dynamic light heartedness and open mindedness, instead it is occasionally described as a rather frightening company run by Kool-Aid drinking tyrants whose hubris has condemned them to eventual nemesis. Steve Ballmer is a just completely different type of CEO compared to the young idealistic Bill Gates, he is the traditional capitalist who never appears to be listening and steams on regardless like the captain of the Titanic. Most companies develop into big heavy narrow minded beasts as they as they grow, because wealth and power undermine idealism creating vested interests across the organization, and these interests turn away from the pain of self knowledge and begin clinging onto their outdated philosophies in the pleasure of self-aggrandisement, preventing wisdom, corrupting decision making, and eventually bringing existential failure.Windows 1995 perhaps marked the very subtle beginning of a new era at Microsoft in which it began to dumb down functionality in order to make products easier to use or better looking - the beginning of a transfer of power away from open minded geeks to marketing specialists - the beginning of power user disillusionment and Microsoft's attempt at populism. For example, in Windows 95 Microsoft started hiding the tree inside their file open dialogues. Novice users can be confused by the tree, and it clutters the GUI, but it is a very powerful feature and hiding it dramatically reduces functionality.
Windows 3.11 File Open showing tree
Windows 95 File Open - With tree removed
Shortly after Windows 95, Apple released System 7.5. This release had the codename Capone, which was a reference to the gangster who put fear in Chicago – Chicago being Microsoft’s codename for Windows 95.
1996 Mac System 7.5.3. Notice the bottom 'control strip', the beginning of the Apple task bar
Apple may have nicknamed their operating system Capone, but in truth their market share had peaked at 12% in 1992 and had been in decline ever since. The advent of Windows 95 only heralded an acceleration of that process. See the pink line on the chart below – notice the increased rate of decline after 1995. By 1997 Apple were is crisis and Steve Jobs, who had left years earlier to found NeXT, was brought back to rescue the company. Shortly after his arrival a new operating system was released. A year later in 1998 Microsoft released 'Windows 98'. It offered improved stability and hardware support but had few GUI changes. No screenshot is shown here.
Also in 1998 Steve Jobs of Apple Mac introduced the iMac. Although technically unimpressive both in terms of hardware and operating system it featured a new translucent plastic exterior, originally in Bondi Blue, but later many other colours. The iMac proved phenomenally successful, selling close to 800,000 units in its first five months and significantly boosting the company's revenue and profitability. Thanks to the iMac, fiscal 1998 was Apple's first profitable year since 1993. The iMac is now considered an industrial design icon of the late 90s. In 2001 the launch of the iPod further contributed to the popularity of the Apple brand and it’s PCs. In 2001 Apple Mac released a brand new fully 32 bit modern operating system with a Unix-like core. This new version did not offer backward compatibility with older software but it has still proven a great success. To me, Windows 95/98, with it's angular 3D grey borders and controls, feels very bleak and dated compared to this new Apple GUI. Most people would say that aesthetically this OS put Apple well ahead and it took several years until the release of Vista for Microsoft to even begin catching up.
In terms of GUI functionality, however, many power user were much less impressed. Microsoft had long dominated OS and Application GUI design, but the near dead Apple still resisted too obviously copying. Perhaps Steve Jobs felt he could not be seen to be copying Microsoft; but BMW would never balk at fitting innovations such as anti-lock braking systems to their cars just because Mercedes got there first. For example: Microsoft had three buttons on the right of each windows for maximization, minimization and close. Apple added three buttons to the left but bizarrely altered their behaviour (Mac users generally have to close applications with Apple-Q). The bottom Dock came with huge icons and greatly reduced functionality compared to the Windows 95/98 task bar. Apple also passed up a chance to abandon its unorthodox common top menu bar, single button mouse, lack of a delete key, treeless path browsing, underpowered application install/uninstall etc. Microsoft called OS X a "toy", but it became an increasingly popular toy. Apple is sometimes accused of emphasising "form over function". Given that Apple's primary market is the home user or SoHo designer this is natural - but some accuse Apple of taking the process too far. Perhaps the single most damming case against Apple revolves around the iPod, and to understand the charge one needs to begin by understanding the history. Steve Jobs wanted to move Apple into consumer electronics instead of just computers, and he studied the Sony Walkman and set out to create the digital audio player (DAP) equivalent. The Sony Walkman wasn't the world's first personal cassette player, but it was the first personal player that was both extremely well executed and marketed. Sony's 1979 advertisements portrayed the excellence of Japanese engineering and craftsmanship, bringing together technology, miniaturization, quality and aesthetics. Sony advertisements also portrayed the device as culturally hip, connecting with popular culture, youthfulness, movement, freedom. The device became enormously popular, and it is still widely regarded as one of the most influential consumer electronics products in history.Steve Jobs wasn't the only person who could see that DAPs were going to take over the world eventually, but it was an emerging technology and many large companies were afraid of the legal questions surrounding both pirate music and CD ripping, and the implications for CD sales. So the DAP market was still very much in its infancy when Apple launched the iPod in October 2001. The existing DAP hardware companies were tiny start-ups, and software for ripping CDs was very cumbersome. Apple combined both beautiful hardware with easy to use CD ripping and music management software, creating the first really desirable DAP. Apple's fame and impressive marketing opened the general public's hearts and minds, turning a geeky niche into the biggest product of the day. Two years later Apple opened the first electronic music store, saving users the hassle of ripping their CDs, making the iPod far more practical, and locking users into the Apple universe with proprietary copy protected file formats (years later Apple switched to an open system under pressure from regulators). Steve Jobs had succeeded in producing the next Sony Walkman, the iPod transformed his company and made him into the King of Consumer Electronics. To a certain extent it was a lucky break, but when he repeated the trick a few years later with the iPhone, the first really desirable smartphone, the world was left in no doubt as to his genius.
Yet behind the glossy exterior, both the iPod and the iPhone offer inferior sound quality compared to both old fashioned Sony CD Walkmans and new Sony DAP players such as the NW-HD5 (update: this still true in Sep 2011). Many reviewers have criticised Apple's sound quality, I personally conducted a series of blind listening tests on classical music tracks at dinner parties in my home, testing an iPod, an iPhone, a Sony NW-HD5, a special edition Sony CD Walkman, a Yamaha CDRHD1500 Home Hard Drive Player, and a high end Marantz Home CD Player. People found the hardware largely indistinguishable, with the exception of the iPod and iPhone. Every single person, even people in their 70s, rapidly singled out and condemned Apple's audio quality which blatantly lacks depth and richness. Ordinary people listening to popular music don't notice sound quality, but iPods and iPhones are expensive high end devices, there is no financial or technical reason for them to employ inadequate audio circuitry. It is ironic that the Sony Walkman was designed by a Japanese engineer who wanted to listen to Opera on the train, but I can't play Opera on my iPod or iPhone because the audio quality just isn't good enough.
Apple is famous for its Japanese style attention to detail, yet in this particular case it appears, at least to some extent, more interested in appearances than functionality, it has turned a blind eye to the core issue that old fashioned audio engineers idealised above all else. Steve Jobs is famous for going beyond traditions and popular opinions and designing his products for the history books, but in a sense he still designed the iPod for himself, or rather his own vision of why the Sony Walkman entered the history books, he didn't grasp the totality of the Walkman, he focused on the innovative unique selling points which wowed everyone when the Walkmanwas released, he let down the long line of Japanese engineers who dedicated their lives to state of the art sound quality, he imitated rather than replicated the greatness of that historical moment. The philosopher Plato would say he painted a picture that captured the success of the moment as seen by the crowd, he didn't connect with the multifaceted three dimensional reality that transcends individual perspectives. Vague accusations of shallowness are regularly hurled at Apple, but its failure to produce devices that sound as good as old incumbents such as Sony is, I think, the most devastating charge laid against Apple greatness. A significant upgrade to the Windows system also came in 2001 with the release of Windows XP. This version offered a fully 32 bit core, many new security features and a convergence of home and business versions (no more Windows NT).
The GUI changed as well - an attempt was made to make the product generally warmer and more friendly. For example, colourful icons and descriptions appeared in inside folders ('Web Folders'). Interestingly, almost all large corporate users and home ‘power users’ disabled this new feature. Although Windows XP felt somewhat smarter and more modern than it’s predecessors, looking at the screen shot above, some will wonder why Microsoft didn’t try and make it a little less colourful and a little more stylish. The image above shows the typical power user setup. There are no icons on the desktop, the start menu is set to classic mode and has been extensively customized, the system tray has no superfluous icons, IE7 has been setup to show menus and the search box has been replaced with the google toolbar, windows explorer is running instead of my computer. As I write this in December 2007 Vista has just celebrated its first anniversary. It is thought to be the worlds largest software project to date - estimated at 10,000 employees working for five years - perhaps a $10billion spend.
Apple Mac’s share of the home market has increased substantially in 2007. It’s clear that the Apple brand is going from strength to strength with increasing awareness and trust in its stylish products. Many people now believe: (a) Apple is better looking (b) Apple is easier to use (c) Apples crash less and don't get viruses (d) PC’s are for geeks who don’t mind tearing their hair out for days on end fighting with config files and driver patches etc.
Look at the average home user’s Windows PC and you usually find a mass of icons running in the system tray and programs such as Norton Anti-Virus crippling the machine. Personally I often find friends of mine have a PC problem they need help with – for example, a few weeks ago a friend couldn’t play CDs. It took me half an hour to figure out the problem - put one in the machine and three programs were trying to play the CD simultaneously resulting in strange clicking noises. The mass of poor quality software available and installed on PCs often makes them very unreliable and frustrating devices.
Vista did not solve these problems – in fact it made them worse. Vista turned out to be nightmare of software and hardware compatibility issues. Even famous application such as Windows Live Messenger, iTunes, Visual Studio 2005 and Outlook 2003 failed to run fully or at all under Vista and had to be patched. Although users were encouraged to upgrade an existing install of XP to Vista, doing so was fraught with problems and should probably never have even been allowed. Even brand new laptops running Vista and shipped by Sony turned out to be unstable. These enormous problems hugely fuelled the perception that Windows is unreliable and Apple Mac is a better choice. Apple even capitalized on the Vista problems by running advertising campaigns deriding Vista (eg "Apple - It just works").
The new Aero interface won some fans but it was no Mac OS X killer. Only Windows Media Centre really demonstrated the power of the fast GUI technology introduced into Vista. But Media Centre typifies the Vista experience. Every set top box I have ever seen shows as many channels as possible when one is browsing, but Microsoft decided to show only seven. Not only does Media Centre stupidly show only seven channels at a time, no matter how sexy the interface may be, it is undeniably hard to navigate. So here Microsoft is sacrificing both power and simplicity in order to jazz up the product.
Some users actually complained Vista was ugly. Consider the Windows Photo Gallery screenshot below. Steve Jobs famously took a calligraphy class which inspired the beautiful Mac typography. Surely Microsoft can afford to employ some one good typographical taste? Look at the words "Go To Gallery", it's tasteless. Notice the valuable vertical screen space sacrificed to over sized top and bottom control bars, and the big chunky buttons. Steve Jobs and the stylish crowd at Apple always laugh at the ugly special buttons and stickers PC Laptop manufactures insist on adding to their machines. Is Windows now Walmart GUI? Notice also the lack of conventional menu bar in Windows Photo Gallery. Microsoft is probably removing the menu bars because it looks sexier (Apple Mac Style), but many argue it simply makes the product harder / slower to use.
Here is a quote from www.zabkat.com where a replacement for Microsoft's Windows Explorer called Xplorer2 is sold:
For a long time leading to the release of Vista, I was afraid that it would be the end of xplorer². As it turned out, quite the opposite has happened. All of a sudden the most popular search keyword is "vista explorer replacement" driving early adopters to my website... Where the hell is the menu bar in Vista's explorer? That must be the nadir of improvement ideas... But I can't complain :)
Forcing a user to change, especially if he thinks it is for the worse, may upset him intensely. The individual may feel as if his freedom has been violated. In his unconscious Microsoft becomes an evil arrogant oppressor. Change aggravates precisely your most loyal customers. Microsoft need to remember the Coca-Cola Classic Lesson.
With Vista Microsoft realised, rightly, that a security model to protect home users running as administrators required an innovative new approach not found on other operating systems. However, the many pop-ups and permission denied messages ended up aggravating users. Instead of one pop-up per task, several could be generated. Worse, users found even legitimate administrator access requests blocked on some occasions. IE7 ran in a new 'protected mode', yet many harmless controls still required prompts leaving many users feeling no further forward. On top of that the security model never went far enough. At the end of day an admin permission warning is not enough, we need to know more about what is going under the hood unless we are going to go the app store route.Unlike Windows, which sees a major release every three to four years, new releases of Apple's OS X are much more incremental. Each yearly release usually carries a few headline improvements and lots of little tinkerings. After the many problems Microsoft experienced with Vista it is also now considering adopting a more frequent and less groundbreaking release schedule.
Designed to compete with Vista one of the things most noticeable about Leopard upon first glance is the amount of new eye candy. The desktop is empty of icons - the first OS to make that move even though it's been an obvious step since Windows 95. The new Dock (or Task Bar) shown exploding on the right of the picture above, allows for a folder of documents / programs, thereby addressing some of the shortcoming of using the dock for application shortcuts. The new 'Finder', which is the Apple equivalent of Windows Explorer, is also shown in the picture above. It has a new iTunes style cover flow mode which takes the user about as far from the old fashioned tree as one can imagine.
The engineers at Xerox were excited by the Alto project, but they didn't understand its potential. By the time Xerox released the Star 8010 in 1981, Apple were already hard at work on their own GUI based computer. When Steve Jobs saw the new Xerox machine he instantly knew Xerox had dropped the ball. The computer's mouse couldn't move diagonally, it didn't have overlapping windows, nor even dialogue boxes, and its operating system still revolved around keyboard commands. Apple were working on something far more revolutionary, and it took them many years and many millions of dollars to perfect the technology. In a sense the The development of the GUI made the Apple Mac popular for Graphical Desktop Publishing, but the IBM PC clone was still able to maintain market dominance. Meanwhile Microsoft worked on a GUI of it's own, and in 1985 it released an add-on to MSDOS called 'Windows 1.0'. However, this first version of Windows came with no useful compatible applications and its general functionality was limited by legal challenges from Apple (eg no overlapping windows). After defeating the law suites (Bill Gates defended them with the claim “hey you copied from Xerox”) it was able to release the much improved Windows 2.0 in 1987. That same year, two important programs written to work with Windows 2.0 were released: Microsoft Excel and Desktop Publisher Aldus PageMaker (the latter had previously only been available on the Apple Mac). Some computer historians date the release of PageMaker, the first appearance of a significant and non-Microsoft application for Windows, as the beginning of the success of Windows.Xerox engineers had just stumbled across a very roughly drawn picture of the future, and Steve Jobs was the genius visionary who screamed eureka the instant he saw it, and then dedicated himself and his company to making it a reality. In 1983 Apple finally released their first GUI based computer. Unfortunately the "Lisa" computer was an expensive machine targeted at business and academia which proved to be a commercial failure. A year later Apple launched their successful "Macintosh" computer for consumers. Although Apple remained a niche player, it should be remembered that the IBM PC was a sort of meteor that hit the earth and wiped all life, Apple was essentially the single survivor of this dramatic evolutionary event.
Before GUIs, users relied on complicated key combinations and typed commands to control computers. Steve Jobs focused on bringing computers to the masses by making them friendly, fun and easy to use - and he succeeded.
In 1985, before the success of the Macintosh was clear, Apple's board of directors forced 30 year old Steve Jobs to resign. The Lisa had failed, Apple was loosing ground in word-processing, there had been disagreements over costs and the hyperactive Jobs had become very hard to work with. In 1997 Apple brought Jobs back when it purchased NeXT.
1984 Apple Macintosh, first popular GUI computer:
1984 Mac GUI:
1987 Windows 2.0
It is interesting to compare the GUIs at this stage.
Windows could run applications side by side and had minimization and maximization buttons. Although the $10k Apple Lisa supported multiple applications, up until Operating System 7 in 1991 the Macintosh could only run one application at a time (like the early iPhone - no multitasking).
Apple applications shared a common menu bar in a fixed location at the top of the screen - a design which remains today. Windows, by contrast, demanded each window maintain its own interface. The Apple approach made sense at the time, especially on a machine that can only run one process at a time. In future years, however, it has suffered two major disadvantages. First, applications running in a window on a big screen could appear a long way from their menu bar. Second, applications had reduced interface flexibility, eg advent of 'Skins' and the new Office 2007 Menu system. Today, the Microsoft approach is the standard used by non Apple GUIs such as Linux etc.
Apple used the common menu bar at the top of the window to launch applications, but Microsoft instead chose a 'Program Manger' application that contained icon shortcuts to programs and other folders. The Microsoft approach allowed for the hierarchical organisation of large numbers of applications / shortcuts (which was not possible with the simple Apple Menu), but it also contributed to clutter and complexity as the user opened folder after folder in search of his target. In 1995 Microsoft completely replaced the Program Manger technique with the 'Start Menu'.
Apple adopted a friendly icon based approach to browsing the hard drive but Windows employed a vertical tree based application called File Manager. The vertical tree approach is much more effective, but novice computer users often struggle to understand it. This difference is one of many that reflects a divergence of design philosophy in those early days - while Steve Jobs of Apple concentrated on making his system friendly and aesthetic, Bill Gates and the brilliant geeky programmers living on caffeine at Microsoft concentrated on power and technicalities.
To see the difference in aesthetic design compare two early text editor applications from Apple and Microsoft.
Steve Jobs named his first computer after his daughter Lisa because it was so easy to use. Looking at the screenshot above one wonders if Bill Gates could have used the same name for Windows 1.0, not because it was child’s play to use, but rather because it looked as if Steve's daughter ran his graphic design.
It should be said that although Apple and Microsoft were among the first to market, all the remaining vendors were also working on GUI at this time as well. The screenshot below shows an interesting example from a British company called Acorn. This GUI had something approaching a task bar showing active applications, an idea that would make its way into the Windows and Apple GUI some years later.Another interesting GUI comes from NeXT. After leaving Apple Steve Jobs founded NeXT and started developing very trendy, powerful and expensive Unix workstations. His first GUI is pictured below, it shows a 3D effect on the windows, icons and menus. Two years later Microsoft adopted a 3D look as well.
1988 NeXT GUI with 3D looking Windows and Icons
Both IBM PC Hardware and the Microsoft Windows GUI suffered one huge disadvantage compared to the Macintosh – they needed to retain complete backwards compatibility with older software. As a result it wasn’t until the advent of the powerful Intel 386 processor and the release of Windows 3.0 that Microsoft’s GUI really took off.
1990 Windows 3.0
1991 Apple’s System 7
1992 Microsoft Windows 3.11
Of course, the popularity of Windows went hand in hand with the availability of Windows applications. Perhaps Microsoft’s most remarkable feat was to leverage the GUI skills acquired whilst developing Windows in the production of Spreadsheets and Word Processors.
The screenshot below shows the first version of Excel released in 1987 for Windows 2.0 which completely outclassed the market leading Lotus123 spreadsheet both in terms of GUI and core functionality. Almost overnight Lotus started loosing market share and within a few years it was no more than a memory. Lotus was the largest software company in the world and the spreadsheet was the most complex and profitable program around. Yet Microsoft steamrolled right over it with the first release. Remarkable.
1987 Excel 2.0 for Windows
1988 Excel 2.1. The start of the grey borders and 3D effect.
1991 Excel 3.0. The first application to use a modern toolbar
By contrast, in 1991 Word Perfect released Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS and Word Perfect 5.1 for Windows. Word Perfect was the biggest application of it's day, but its GUI version was both late to market and outclassed by Word. The screen shot below shows the famous but complicated 'Reveal Codes' feature which was rendered essentially obsolete by WYSIWYG editing.
1991 & 1992 Word Perfect
The table below shows the market share of Microsoft Word relative to its competitors. By 1993 WordPerfect was beaten, by 1997 Microsoft had captured a greater than 90% market share.
The Macintosh version of Word took market share away from competitors such as MacWrite even more quickly and more decisively. This is interesting because it’s inconsistent with the often repeated theory that Microsoft’s dominance stemmed only from insider knowledge of the underlying platform operating system. Insider knowledge was no help to Apple, first their MacWrite word processor's market share was burned by Word Perfect, then it was vaporised by MS Word.
Although Windows 3.1 was extremely popular it’s MSDOS heritage left it with several major flaws, not least of which was stability. For business users, who required less compatibility with legacy applications, especially games, Microsoft offered an alternative operating system called 'Windows NT' (Windows NT was released in July 1993 with a GUI very like regular Windows. Originally it was a cross platform 32 bit operating system, but the non Intel versions never caught on).
In 1995 Microsoft released an enormous upgrade that finally gave the home user a stable sophisticated modern mostly 32 bit operating system with protected memory and preemptive multitasking (features that would take another seven years to reach the Apple Mac).
As well as huge under the hood improvements Windows 95 offered a radical new GUI. Microsoft introduced the 'Task Bar' which accomplished three things:
(1) The prominent 'Start Menu' at the far left of the Task Bar simplified launching programs or accessing OS features such as Control Panel. Instead of hunting for icons on the Desktop or in Program Manager all features were available in one easy to find place. Microsoft were proud of the Start Menu and it featured heavily in their advertising campaigns for Windows 95. Although the Start Menu has been a great success, novice users have never found it as easy to customize or navigate as the desktop and often continue to store some programs or documents there.
(2) Most early GUIs, including ones from Apple and Microsoft, minimized running programs to icons on the desktop where they could be lost amongst similar looking icons, or hidden from view by windows running on top of them. The task bar rectified this problem by putting all running programs into one highly visible place.
(3) The Task Bar also featured a system tray where users could see the clock and system applications.
Today the task bar with start menu, running applications and system tray is the standard used by both the latest Microsoft & Linux GUIs. It’s notable that while Microsoft was prepared to completely junk its Program Manager interface and replace it with a start menu & task bar, Apple only reluctantly and gradually added a task bar to their system over the next several years. Such a bold design decision testifies to Microsoft's famously aggressive tendancy to innovate, assimilate, copy and redesign which was surely one of the principle factors behind the company's meteoric rise during the 1980s and 1990s.
Such extreme willingness to change, such open-mindedness and avoidance of dogma and ideology, is highly unusual. For example, in a 1983 Television program called the Apple Macintosh Dating Game, Bill Gates is asked by Steve Jobs "Will Macintosh become the third industry standard?" Bill Gates answers: "To create a new standard it takes something that is not just a little bit different, it takes something that is really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh is of all the machines I have ever seen the only one that meets that standard." What comes across in that TV program is the total intellectual honesty of the young geeky Bill Gates, it's not about money or Microsoft, it's about computers. That young carefree Bill Gates was the sort of person who believed in nothing, if you could prove him wrong he would change, he had no ego and all that mattered was the product. These days Microsoft has lost that early association with dynamic light heartedness and open mindedness, instead it is occasionally described as a rather frightening company run by Kool-Aid drinking tyrants whose hubris has condemned them to eventual nemesis. Steve Ballmer is a just completely different type of CEO compared to the young idealistic Bill Gates, he is the traditional capitalist who never appears to be listening and steams on regardless like the captain of the Titanic. Most companies develop into big heavy narrow minded beasts as they as they grow, because wealth and power undermine idealism creating vested interests across the organization, and these interests turn away from the pain of self knowledge and begin clinging onto their outdated philosophies in the pleasure of self-aggrandisement, preventing wisdom, corrupting decision making, and eventually bringing existential failure.Windows 1995 perhaps marked the very subtle beginning of a new era at Microsoft in which it began to dumb down functionality in order to make products easier to use or better looking - the beginning of a transfer of power away from open minded geeks to marketing specialists - the beginning of power user disillusionment and Microsoft's attempt at populism. For example, in Windows 95 Microsoft started hiding the tree inside their file open dialogues. Novice users can be confused by the tree, and it clutters the GUI, but it is a very powerful feature and hiding it dramatically reduces functionality.
Windows 3.11 File Open showing tree
Windows 95 File Open - With tree removed Shortly after Windows 95, Apple released System 7.5. This release had the codename Capone, which was a reference to the gangster who put fear in Chicago – Chicago being Microsoft’s codename for Windows 95.
1996 Mac System 7.5.3. Notice the bottom 'control strip', the beginning of the Apple task bar
Apple may have nicknamed their operating system Capone, but in truth their market share had peaked at 12% in 1992 and had been in decline ever since. The advent of Windows 95 only heralded an acceleration of that process. See the pink line on the chart below – notice the increased rate of decline after 1995. By 1997 Apple were is crisis and Steve Jobs, who had left years earlier to found NeXT, was brought back to rescue the company. Shortly after his arrival a new operating system was released. A year later in 1998 Microsoft released 'Windows 98'. It offered improved stability and hardware support but had few GUI changes. No screenshot is shown here.
Also in 1998 Steve Jobs of Apple Mac introduced the iMac. Although technically unimpressive both in terms of hardware and operating system it featured a new translucent plastic exterior, originally in Bondi Blue, but later many other colours. The iMac proved phenomenally successful, selling close to 800,000 units in its first five months and significantly boosting the company's revenue and profitability. Thanks to the iMac, fiscal 1998 was Apple's first profitable year since 1993. The iMac is now considered an industrial design icon of the late 90s. In 2001 the launch of the iPod further contributed to the popularity of the Apple brand and it’s PCs. In 2001 Apple Mac released a brand new fully 32 bit modern operating system with a Unix-like core. This new version did not offer backward compatibility with older software but it has still proven a great success. To me, Windows 95/98, with it's angular 3D grey borders and controls, feels very bleak and dated compared to this new Apple GUI. Most people would say that aesthetically this OS put Apple well ahead and it took several years until the release of Vista for Microsoft to even begin catching up.
In terms of GUI functionality, however, many power user were much less impressed. Microsoft had long dominated OS and Application GUI design, but the near dead Apple still resisted too obviously copying. Perhaps Steve Jobs felt he could not be seen to be copying Microsoft; but BMW would never balk at fitting innovations such as anti-lock braking systems to their cars just because Mercedes got there first. For example: Microsoft had three buttons on the right of each windows for maximization, minimization and close. Apple added three buttons to the left but bizarrely altered their behaviour (Mac users generally have to close applications with Apple-Q). The bottom Dock came with huge icons and greatly reduced functionality compared to the Windows 95/98 task bar. Apple also passed up a chance to abandon its unorthodox common top menu bar, single button mouse, lack of a delete key, treeless path browsing, underpowered application install/uninstall etc. Microsoft called OS X a "toy", but it became an increasingly popular toy. Apple is sometimes accused of emphasising "form over function". Given that Apple's primary market is the home user or SoHo designer this is natural - but some accuse Apple of taking the process too far. Perhaps the single most damming case against Apple revolves around the iPod, and to understand the charge one needs to begin by understanding the history. Steve Jobs wanted to move Apple into consumer electronics instead of just computers, and he studied the Sony Walkman and set out to create the digital audio player (DAP) equivalent. The Sony Walkman wasn't the world's first personal cassette player, but it was the first personal player that was both extremely well executed and marketed. Sony's 1979 advertisements portrayed the excellence of Japanese engineering and craftsmanship, bringing together technology, miniaturization, quality and aesthetics. Sony advertisements also portrayed the device as culturally hip, connecting with popular culture, youthfulness, movement, freedom. The device became enormously popular, and it is still widely regarded as one of the most influential consumer electronics products in history.Steve Jobs wasn't the only person who could see that DAPs were going to take over the world eventually, but it was an emerging technology and many large companies were afraid of the legal questions surrounding both pirate music and CD ripping, and the implications for CD sales. So the DAP market was still very much in its infancy when Apple launched the iPod in October 2001. The existing DAP hardware companies were tiny start-ups, and software for ripping CDs was very cumbersome. Apple combined both beautiful hardware with easy to use CD ripping and music management software, creating the first really desirable DAP. Apple's fame and impressive marketing opened the general public's hearts and minds, turning a geeky niche into the biggest product of the day. Two years later Apple opened the first electronic music store, saving users the hassle of ripping their CDs, making the iPod far more practical, and locking users into the Apple universe with proprietary copy protected file formats (years later Apple switched to an open system under pressure from regulators). Steve Jobs had succeeded in producing the next Sony Walkman, the iPod transformed his company and made him into the King of Consumer Electronics. To a certain extent it was a lucky break, but when he repeated the trick a few years later with the iPhone, the first really desirable smartphone, the world was left in no doubt as to his genius.
Yet behind the glossy exterior, both the iPod and the iPhone offer inferior sound quality compared to both old fashioned Sony CD Walkmans and new Sony DAP players such as the NW-HD5 (update: this still true in Sep 2011). Many reviewers have criticised Apple's sound quality, I personally conducted a series of blind listening tests on classical music tracks at dinner parties in my home, testing an iPod, an iPhone, a Sony NW-HD5, a special edition Sony CD Walkman, a Yamaha CDRHD1500 Home Hard Drive Player, and a high end Marantz Home CD Player. People found the hardware largely indistinguishable, with the exception of the iPod and iPhone. Every single person, even people in their 70s, rapidly singled out and condemned Apple's audio quality which blatantly lacks depth and richness. Ordinary people listening to popular music don't notice sound quality, but iPods and iPhones are expensive high end devices, there is no financial or technical reason for them to employ inadequate audio circuitry. It is ironic that the Sony Walkman was designed by a Japanese engineer who wanted to listen to Opera on the train, but I can't play Opera on my iPod or iPhone because the audio quality just isn't good enough.
Apple is famous for its Japanese style attention to detail, yet in this particular case it appears, at least to some extent, more interested in appearances than functionality, it has turned a blind eye to the core issue that old fashioned audio engineers idealised above all else. Steve Jobs is famous for going beyond traditions and popular opinions and designing his products for the history books, but in a sense he still designed the iPod for himself, or rather his own vision of why the Sony Walkman entered the history books, he didn't grasp the totality of the Walkman, he focused on the innovative unique selling points which wowed everyone when the Walkmanwas released, he let down the long line of Japanese engineers who dedicated their lives to state of the art sound quality, he imitated rather than replicated the greatness of that historical moment. The philosopher Plato would say he painted a picture that captured the success of the moment as seen by the crowd, he didn't connect with the multifaceted three dimensional reality that transcends individual perspectives. Vague accusations of shallowness are regularly hurled at Apple, but its failure to produce devices that sound as good as old incumbents such as Sony is, I think, the most devastating charge laid against Apple greatness. A significant upgrade to the Windows system also came in 2001 with the release of Windows XP. This version offered a fully 32 bit core, many new security features and a convergence of home and business versions (no more Windows NT).
The GUI changed as well - an attempt was made to make the product generally warmer and more friendly. For example, colourful icons and descriptions appeared in inside folders ('Web Folders'). Interestingly, almost all large corporate users and home ‘power users’ disabled this new feature. Although Windows XP felt somewhat smarter and more modern than it’s predecessors, looking at the screen shot above, some will wonder why Microsoft didn’t try and make it a little less colourful and a little more stylish. The image above shows the typical power user setup. There are no icons on the desktop, the start menu is set to classic mode and has been extensively customized, the system tray has no superfluous icons, IE7 has been setup to show menus and the search box has been replaced with the google toolbar, windows explorer is running instead of my computer. As I write this in December 2007 Vista has just celebrated its first anniversary. It is thought to be the worlds largest software project to date - estimated at 10,000 employees working for five years - perhaps a $10billion spend.
Apple Mac’s share of the home market has increased substantially in 2007. It’s clear that the Apple brand is going from strength to strength with increasing awareness and trust in its stylish products. Many people now believe: (a) Apple is better looking (b) Apple is easier to use (c) Apples crash less and don't get viruses (d) PC’s are for geeks who don’t mind tearing their hair out for days on end fighting with config files and driver patches etc.
Look at the average home user’s Windows PC and you usually find a mass of icons running in the system tray and programs such as Norton Anti-Virus crippling the machine. Personally I often find friends of mine have a PC problem they need help with – for example, a few weeks ago a friend couldn’t play CDs. It took me half an hour to figure out the problem - put one in the machine and three programs were trying to play the CD simultaneously resulting in strange clicking noises. The mass of poor quality software available and installed on PCs often makes them very unreliable and frustrating devices.
Vista did not solve these problems – in fact it made them worse. Vista turned out to be nightmare of software and hardware compatibility issues. Even famous application such as Windows Live Messenger, iTunes, Visual Studio 2005 and Outlook 2003 failed to run fully or at all under Vista and had to be patched. Although users were encouraged to upgrade an existing install of XP to Vista, doing so was fraught with problems and should probably never have even been allowed. Even brand new laptops running Vista and shipped by Sony turned out to be unstable. These enormous problems hugely fuelled the perception that Windows is unreliable and Apple Mac is a better choice. Apple even capitalized on the Vista problems by running advertising campaigns deriding Vista (eg "Apple - It just works").
The new Aero interface won some fans but it was no Mac OS X killer. Only Windows Media Centre really demonstrated the power of the fast GUI technology introduced into Vista. But Media Centre typifies the Vista experience. Every set top box I have ever seen shows as many channels as possible when one is browsing, but Microsoft decided to show only seven. Not only does Media Centre stupidly show only seven channels at a time, no matter how sexy the interface may be, it is undeniably hard to navigate. So here Microsoft is sacrificing both power and simplicity in order to jazz up the product.
Some users actually complained Vista was ugly. Consider the Windows Photo Gallery screenshot below. Steve Jobs famously took a calligraphy class which inspired the beautiful Mac typography. Surely Microsoft can afford to employ some one good typographical taste? Look at the words "Go To Gallery", it's tasteless. Notice the valuable vertical screen space sacrificed to over sized top and bottom control bars, and the big chunky buttons. Steve Jobs and the stylish crowd at Apple always laugh at the ugly special buttons and stickers PC Laptop manufactures insist on adding to their machines. Is Windows now Walmart GUI? Notice also the lack of conventional menu bar in Windows Photo Gallery. Microsoft is probably removing the menu bars because it looks sexier (Apple Mac Style), but many argue it simply makes the product harder / slower to use.
Here is a quote from www.zabkat.com where a replacement for Microsoft's Windows Explorer called Xplorer2 is sold:
For a long time leading to the release of Vista, I was afraid that it would be the end of xplorer². As it turned out, quite the opposite has happened. All of a sudden the most popular search keyword is "vista explorer replacement" driving early adopters to my website... Where the hell is the menu bar in Vista's explorer? That must be the nadir of improvement ideas... But I can't complain :)
Forcing a user to change, especially if he thinks it is for the worse, may upset him intensely. The individual may feel as if his freedom has been violated. In his unconscious Microsoft becomes an evil arrogant oppressor. Change aggravates precisely your most loyal customers. Microsoft need to remember the Coca-Cola Classic Lesson.
With Vista Microsoft realised, rightly, that a security model to protect home users running as administrators required an innovative new approach not found on other operating systems. However, the many pop-ups and permission denied messages ended up aggravating users. Instead of one pop-up per task, several could be generated. Worse, users found even legitimate administrator access requests blocked on some occasions. IE7 ran in a new 'protected mode', yet many harmless controls still required prompts leaving many users feeling no further forward. On top of that the security model never went far enough. At the end of day an admin permission warning is not enough, we need to know more about what is going under the hood unless we are going to go the app store route.Unlike Windows, which sees a major release every three to four years, new releases of Apple's OS X are much more incremental. Each yearly release usually carries a few headline improvements and lots of little tinkerings. After the many problems Microsoft experienced with Vista it is also now considering adopting a more frequent and less groundbreaking release schedule.
Designed to compete with Vista one of the things most noticeable about Leopard upon first glance is the amount of new eye candy. The desktop is empty of icons - the first OS to make that move even though it's been an obvious step since Windows 95. The new Dock (or Task Bar) shown exploding on the right of the picture above, allows for a folder of documents / programs, thereby addressing some of the shortcoming of using the dock for application shortcuts. The new 'Finder', which is the Apple equivalent of Windows Explorer, is also shown in the picture above. It has a new iTunes style cover flow mode which takes the user about as far from the old fashioned tree as one can imagine.
Apple did not have time to rethink the security model, as Vista did, in this release. Other major omissions compared to Vista in this release include Media Centre and HD DVD support.
Windows 7 - Update August 2010I have had a couple of emails asking me about a Windows 7 review. The truth is I don't use it and all I can offer is one small anecdote. A friend of mine brought round his horribly ugly HP laptop and I noticed he had Windows Updates turned off. I told him that was dangerous and turned them back on. After the updates installed the sound card didn't work. The driver was there but no sound. I searched around but all they had was XP drivers on the HP web site which I couldn't get to install. Despite being a power user who can knock up c++ applications I couldn't fix the problem. In fact, much to my embarrassment someone else figured out how to fix it, click on the driver and roll back. Nevertheless, it's nonsense, at the end of day Windows has become a total nightmare. For geeks like me fixing Windows problems and upgrading PCs used to be fun back in the old days, Microsoft Widows saved 'malekind' from boredom with a whole new hobby when automobiles got too complicated and too reliable. But I ran out of interest when Microsoft released Windows Vista, and when people come to me these days with a PC problem I just tell them to go out and buy a Mac. My sister went the Mac route when I stopped helping her out, she said it was like stepping out of hell. Later she thanked me for getting her to switch before she had kids, she said: my time is precious now!
Conclusion - Designers vs Geeks
1. Steve Jobs has demonstrated the crucial role aesthetics and design play in public appeal. Just as huge PC Manufacturers such as IBM and DELL have failed to entice the public with designs as attractive as the iMac, Microsoft has not succeeded in making Windows as trendy and stylish as it is technically effective. Steve Job's top down management style delivers a clarity of vision and aesthetic standard few technology companies can match. First the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone - how can competing tech giants fumble so often and so obviously? Microsoft, Google, Motorola and many other technology firms desperately need to shed their geeky cultures - think Ferrari vs Star Trek. The 21st Century tech industry will belong to the designers not the geeks.2. Steve Jobs benefits dramatically from a more closed eco-system. The enormous number of software applications / hardware devices that run on Windows was once its greatest strength, but is increasingly becoming its greatest flaw. Much of the software installed on Windows PCs is badly written, hard to use and malicious. These days Windows users are rightly terrified of downloading apps on the internet whereas the closed eco system of the iPhone ensures safety. The Windows experience is akin early capitalism, an era which predates regulation, it starts with dynamism but ends in chaos. For example, eventually consumers stop eating out because without government health and safety inspections restaurants too often poison their customers.
3. Unlike Apple who were able to create a brand new GUI based operating system, Microsoft have maintained backward compatibility which makes their products more complex. In fact many people think fixing the windows experience is an impossible task and we need a brand new OS. The integration of the GUI with the OS and the COM technology are security nightmares embedded in the heart of Windows. Right now Microsoft are very lucky that OS X is too limited, and Linux is still too chaotic, because the world is increasingly itching to rid itself of Windows.
4. Compared to Microsoft, Apple have simplified products to enhance their appeal to the home user. What makes a good software designer? Someone who can see what the user really needs, someone who is prepared to cut out the clutter. For example, when the iPhone was released Steve Jobs didn't bother with cut and paste, because usability mattered more to him than functionality. Every single user complained about the lack of cut and paste, but Jobs knew what he was doing, he is the visionary who dares to be different. Apple's path lies in the consumer products space; you can see that innovate design matters far more to Steve Jobs than power user complexity, so Apple is a consumer not a business brand. For example, Digital Cameras have dreadful user interfaces, the world at Apple's feet goes way beyond computers, media players and phones. Dyson tries to revolutionize functionality, but revolutionizing appearance and interface is enough.
5. Increasingly Microsoft is sacrificing both power and ease of use in order to jazz up their products. Yet this effort is failing because: (a) the PC is that much more intricate, its like trying to simplify the cockpit of a Boeing 747, if anything goes wrong you die. (b) PCs are business machines, business users want powerful and consistent user interfaces. (c) Microsoft are geeks who have no idea what design is, their glory days revolved around functionality, once they gave up the pragmatic search for power they lost themselves in nerd space. Notice how many of Microsoft's attempts to simplify have failed (Web Folders, File Extension Hiding, Treeless Start Menus, Office Assistants, Adaptive Office Menus, even Microsoft Bob) - yet Microsoft refuse to give up. Windows Vista is the most shocking example of how unsuccessful 'jazzing up' and 'dumbing down' has been. Once the most enviable company in America, these days Microsoft is the hated company that forces junk down the throats of the hapless customers trapped inside the Widows world.6. There is a widespread feeling that Microsoft has lost its way. The lack of vision is palpable, it is not so much that the company is running on auto-pilot, rather the marking department have been put in charge. Because these guys have no heart, they can loose touch with their users, and deliver massive failures such as Windows Vista and Office Ribbon. Microsoft's latest GUI designs are an anathema to both the intellectual and the aesthetician. The marketing team do not understand that you can't make policy by feedback surveys alone. Greed killed Microsoft, Bill Gates stopped building software for love, he started building it to make money, slowly the marketing team took over, and the goodness disappeared. For those of us who still use Microsoft Products, the decline is tragic. Are we to spend the rest of our lives running Windows XP and Office 2003?
Yet there is something darker in there too. Once we loved the geeky humility of Bill Gates, but as the company grew we began to hate Microsoft's "full of itself" attitude. Americans are known for their achiever mentality, for the shallow positivity which comes out of the need for success not truth. That shallowness comes in two forms, saccharin falseness and gung-ho arrogance. Yet now that the world hangs on Apple's every word, Microsoft's self confidence is breaking down. What happens to the achiever under stress? He becomes the fighting zealot, the stressed religious maniac. Yet the zealot, like the achiever, also lacks the capacity for self analysis, so his breakdown intensifies his essential faults. Steve Ballmer is a marvellous example of archetypal American personality. He is is the antithesis of the cautious questioning intellectual, he is the gun slinging cowboy who shot down the iPhone as soon as he saw it and declared Windows Mobile 6 winner (television interview). Perhaps Microsoft's decline is a microcosm of America's decline.
Conclusion - Political ReflectionsOne fascinating aspect of the Windows vs Apple debate is the way it reflects some of the issues in the economic debate between free markets vs state capitalism. The following three points illustrate this:
1. The fecklessness of laissez-faire. Apple is famous for its closed hardware system, the PC is famous for open standards and competition. You would have thought we would all prefer an open system, but it can become chaotic. For example, Apple was able to build such an amazing iPhone because it owned both the software and hardware. This is another example of the famous Railway Privatization Problem in the UK which was designed to introduce competition but ended in chaos. A closed system is often associated with higher prices, but economies of scale can actually work to the advantage of a more monopolized market. Apple is gradually developing economies of scale no competitor can touch, what we are increasingly seeing today is a world in which Apple and its competitors sell their products at about the same price, but because Apple has economy of scale advantages it can offer a much higher quality product than its competitors. The biggest danger of a monopolized market is excessive prices, market prices settle at what consumers are willing to pay, whereas in a competitive market prices are supposed to converge on what it costs to produce. Lenin argued that free markets degenerate into monopolies earning excessive profits, but his collective ownership solution failed miserably. The trendy new theory on the block is Chinese State Capitalism which prevents companies from making excessive profits and abusing the market either by heavy handed regulation or state ownership.
2. The greed of laissez-faire. A key element of the Apple concept is the App Store which protects consumers from bad software. One of the problems with commercial software is that it tends to become, to some extent, mal ware. Look at Norton Anti Virus - my personal favorite example of a god awful product driven by commercial pressures. Norton pay lap top manufactures to include it on the machine. They make it as hard as they can to uninstall. They fill it with lots of junk features you don't actually need, but because you are not an expert, you can be tricked into thinking you do need. They love messages that pop up so you retain brand awareness. They report harmless things as malicious to trick you into thinking they are doing a great job. Office Ribbon is another example of the problem of commercial pressures. Disappointed that users were not bothering to upgrade Microsoft set up to create something totally different. The change was not driven by virtue, but by profit. The idea of capitalism is that it is efficient because the end user buys what maximizes his personal contentment. The complaint against capitalism is that the limited expertise and irrationality of consumers, combined with the selfish motives of producers, creates anomalies which destroy the utility maximizing process. Instead you end up with products that damage personal contentment.
3. The irrationally of laissez-faire. Steve Jobs said that working with Wozniak taught him that the difference between a real expert and everyone else is, as far as that subject is concerned, like the difference between a “god” and a “shit head”. Steve Jobs sought to exploit this inequality by building an organization in which people are masters of themselves, but slaves to the community. In other words the world around them only interests itself in what they are capable of producing, and on the basis of this information it sets them set them production goals, and it gives them the freedom to accomplish their goal as they see fit. From the individual’s point of view, he has complete creative power over his own domain, but no creative power over anything outside himself. For example, Steve says I want a device that doesn’t make a noise, and the power supply guy finds a way to implement that; whereas in a normal company the power supply guy would suggest a noiseless fan to Steve, and Steve would then judges how worthwhile that idea is. Therefore in a normal company people are crossing into each of spheres of expertise, over time management fills up with a bunch of unimaginative politicians who rely on the lower ranks and pretend to know everything about everything, and technical departments fill up with a bunch of would be politicians who want to run the whole show themselves. Steve Jobs imagined Apple as an efficient hive of bees minding their own business, he didn’t want a herd of group thinking sheep following each other round the field. The sheep herd’s failure to specialize, to mind one’s own business, creates both muddled thinking and wasteful duplication. What has all this to do with economics and politics? What we are saying here is that rational expectations doesn’t work, the fundament capitalist idea that market price is the best measure of utility and competition is the best way to deliver it, is nonsense. The market price is just the sheep herds wavering opinion, and the stupidity of the herd derives from competitive duplication. In the same way democracy also fails.
These three arguments taken from the Apple-Microsoft example are insights into the wider debate swirling around the world today between the American and the Chinese economic models. Yet I am not suggesting authoritarian Apple should be boycotted in favour of democratic Windows/Linux. Pragmatism, not ideology, should guide our purchasing. I don't mean by that scientific thinking instead of artistic feeling. Just as the sight of a beautiful picture generates positive feelings, for many people computers are aesthetic objects that bring joy to their lives, these aesthetic feelings are not what I mean by ideological. For example, I love my iPhone so much I can cheer myself up just by looking at it or playing with the cool interface. Before the iPhone I had an old Nokia with a black & white display which, unlike modern mobiles, had no timeout. The long battery life, the functional display, and humble design were features I loved. Dogma and ideology are the refusal to open our mind to the choices before us and honestly compare relative merits with detachment. Plato argued that irrationality is inhibited love, this is why he described Socrates and Diptoma as living in a state of bliss, because they never allowed impurities to obscure the flow of understanding and lived in state of total love toward the good they perceived around them. Anyway, the Apple Microsoft debate is a fascinating one because it stirs up particularly passionate clouds of irrationality, much to delight of Apple's marketing team!
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As a final though I leave you with some interesting screenshots showing the evolution of an Apple and Windows application over the years. It’s exciting to watch the aesthetic progression of our GUIs and to wonder what future years will hold. My only fear, as a power user, is that Microsoft will put Apple style ease of use and aesthetics ahead of functionality - I hope they can always remain at least on a level pegging.
1991 Mac
Windows 7 - Update August 2010I have had a couple of emails asking me about a Windows 7 review. The truth is I don't use it and all I can offer is one small anecdote. A friend of mine brought round his horribly ugly HP laptop and I noticed he had Windows Updates turned off. I told him that was dangerous and turned them back on. After the updates installed the sound card didn't work. The driver was there but no sound. I searched around but all they had was XP drivers on the HP web site which I couldn't get to install. Despite being a power user who can knock up c++ applications I couldn't fix the problem. In fact, much to my embarrassment someone else figured out how to fix it, click on the driver and roll back. Nevertheless, it's nonsense, at the end of day Windows has become a total nightmare. For geeks like me fixing Windows problems and upgrading PCs used to be fun back in the old days, Microsoft Widows saved 'malekind' from boredom with a whole new hobby when automobiles got too complicated and too reliable. But I ran out of interest when Microsoft released Windows Vista, and when people come to me these days with a PC problem I just tell them to go out and buy a Mac. My sister went the Mac route when I stopped helping her out, she said it was like stepping out of hell. Later she thanked me for getting her to switch before she had kids, she said: my time is precious now!
Conclusion - Designers vs Geeks
1. Steve Jobs has demonstrated the crucial role aesthetics and design play in public appeal. Just as huge PC Manufacturers such as IBM and DELL have failed to entice the public with designs as attractive as the iMac, Microsoft has not succeeded in making Windows as trendy and stylish as it is technically effective. Steve Job's top down management style delivers a clarity of vision and aesthetic standard few technology companies can match. First the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone - how can competing tech giants fumble so often and so obviously? Microsoft, Google, Motorola and many other technology firms desperately need to shed their geeky cultures - think Ferrari vs Star Trek. The 21st Century tech industry will belong to the designers not the geeks.2. Steve Jobs benefits dramatically from a more closed eco-system. The enormous number of software applications / hardware devices that run on Windows was once its greatest strength, but is increasingly becoming its greatest flaw. Much of the software installed on Windows PCs is badly written, hard to use and malicious. These days Windows users are rightly terrified of downloading apps on the internet whereas the closed eco system of the iPhone ensures safety. The Windows experience is akin early capitalism, an era which predates regulation, it starts with dynamism but ends in chaos. For example, eventually consumers stop eating out because without government health and safety inspections restaurants too often poison their customers.
3. Unlike Apple who were able to create a brand new GUI based operating system, Microsoft have maintained backward compatibility which makes their products more complex. In fact many people think fixing the windows experience is an impossible task and we need a brand new OS. The integration of the GUI with the OS and the COM technology are security nightmares embedded in the heart of Windows. Right now Microsoft are very lucky that OS X is too limited, and Linux is still too chaotic, because the world is increasingly itching to rid itself of Windows.
4. Compared to Microsoft, Apple have simplified products to enhance their appeal to the home user. What makes a good software designer? Someone who can see what the user really needs, someone who is prepared to cut out the clutter. For example, when the iPhone was released Steve Jobs didn't bother with cut and paste, because usability mattered more to him than functionality. Every single user complained about the lack of cut and paste, but Jobs knew what he was doing, he is the visionary who dares to be different. Apple's path lies in the consumer products space; you can see that innovate design matters far more to Steve Jobs than power user complexity, so Apple is a consumer not a business brand. For example, Digital Cameras have dreadful user interfaces, the world at Apple's feet goes way beyond computers, media players and phones. Dyson tries to revolutionize functionality, but revolutionizing appearance and interface is enough.
5. Increasingly Microsoft is sacrificing both power and ease of use in order to jazz up their products. Yet this effort is failing because: (a) the PC is that much more intricate, its like trying to simplify the cockpit of a Boeing 747, if anything goes wrong you die. (b) PCs are business machines, business users want powerful and consistent user interfaces. (c) Microsoft are geeks who have no idea what design is, their glory days revolved around functionality, once they gave up the pragmatic search for power they lost themselves in nerd space. Notice how many of Microsoft's attempts to simplify have failed (Web Folders, File Extension Hiding, Treeless Start Menus, Office Assistants, Adaptive Office Menus, even Microsoft Bob) - yet Microsoft refuse to give up. Windows Vista is the most shocking example of how unsuccessful 'jazzing up' and 'dumbing down' has been. Once the most enviable company in America, these days Microsoft is the hated company that forces junk down the throats of the hapless customers trapped inside the Widows world.6. There is a widespread feeling that Microsoft has lost its way. The lack of vision is palpable, it is not so much that the company is running on auto-pilot, rather the marking department have been put in charge. Because these guys have no heart, they can loose touch with their users, and deliver massive failures such as Windows Vista and Office Ribbon. Microsoft's latest GUI designs are an anathema to both the intellectual and the aesthetician. The marketing team do not understand that you can't make policy by feedback surveys alone. Greed killed Microsoft, Bill Gates stopped building software for love, he started building it to make money, slowly the marketing team took over, and the goodness disappeared. For those of us who still use Microsoft Products, the decline is tragic. Are we to spend the rest of our lives running Windows XP and Office 2003?
Yet there is something darker in there too. Once we loved the geeky humility of Bill Gates, but as the company grew we began to hate Microsoft's "full of itself" attitude. Americans are known for their achiever mentality, for the shallow positivity which comes out of the need for success not truth. That shallowness comes in two forms, saccharin falseness and gung-ho arrogance. Yet now that the world hangs on Apple's every word, Microsoft's self confidence is breaking down. What happens to the achiever under stress? He becomes the fighting zealot, the stressed religious maniac. Yet the zealot, like the achiever, also lacks the capacity for self analysis, so his breakdown intensifies his essential faults. Steve Ballmer is a marvellous example of archetypal American personality. He is is the antithesis of the cautious questioning intellectual, he is the gun slinging cowboy who shot down the iPhone as soon as he saw it and declared Windows Mobile 6 winner (television interview). Perhaps Microsoft's decline is a microcosm of America's decline.
Conclusion - Political ReflectionsOne fascinating aspect of the Windows vs Apple debate is the way it reflects some of the issues in the economic debate between free markets vs state capitalism. The following three points illustrate this:
1. The fecklessness of laissez-faire. Apple is famous for its closed hardware system, the PC is famous for open standards and competition. You would have thought we would all prefer an open system, but it can become chaotic. For example, Apple was able to build such an amazing iPhone because it owned both the software and hardware. This is another example of the famous Railway Privatization Problem in the UK which was designed to introduce competition but ended in chaos. A closed system is often associated with higher prices, but economies of scale can actually work to the advantage of a more monopolized market. Apple is gradually developing economies of scale no competitor can touch, what we are increasingly seeing today is a world in which Apple and its competitors sell their products at about the same price, but because Apple has economy of scale advantages it can offer a much higher quality product than its competitors. The biggest danger of a monopolized market is excessive prices, market prices settle at what consumers are willing to pay, whereas in a competitive market prices are supposed to converge on what it costs to produce. Lenin argued that free markets degenerate into monopolies earning excessive profits, but his collective ownership solution failed miserably. The trendy new theory on the block is Chinese State Capitalism which prevents companies from making excessive profits and abusing the market either by heavy handed regulation or state ownership.
2. The greed of laissez-faire. A key element of the Apple concept is the App Store which protects consumers from bad software. One of the problems with commercial software is that it tends to become, to some extent, mal ware. Look at Norton Anti Virus - my personal favorite example of a god awful product driven by commercial pressures. Norton pay lap top manufactures to include it on the machine. They make it as hard as they can to uninstall. They fill it with lots of junk features you don't actually need, but because you are not an expert, you can be tricked into thinking you do need. They love messages that pop up so you retain brand awareness. They report harmless things as malicious to trick you into thinking they are doing a great job. Office Ribbon is another example of the problem of commercial pressures. Disappointed that users were not bothering to upgrade Microsoft set up to create something totally different. The change was not driven by virtue, but by profit. The idea of capitalism is that it is efficient because the end user buys what maximizes his personal contentment. The complaint against capitalism is that the limited expertise and irrationality of consumers, combined with the selfish motives of producers, creates anomalies which destroy the utility maximizing process. Instead you end up with products that damage personal contentment.
3. The irrationally of laissez-faire. Steve Jobs said that working with Wozniak taught him that the difference between a real expert and everyone else is, as far as that subject is concerned, like the difference between a “god” and a “shit head”. Steve Jobs sought to exploit this inequality by building an organization in which people are masters of themselves, but slaves to the community. In other words the world around them only interests itself in what they are capable of producing, and on the basis of this information it sets them set them production goals, and it gives them the freedom to accomplish their goal as they see fit. From the individual’s point of view, he has complete creative power over his own domain, but no creative power over anything outside himself. For example, Steve says I want a device that doesn’t make a noise, and the power supply guy finds a way to implement that; whereas in a normal company the power supply guy would suggest a noiseless fan to Steve, and Steve would then judges how worthwhile that idea is. Therefore in a normal company people are crossing into each of spheres of expertise, over time management fills up with a bunch of unimaginative politicians who rely on the lower ranks and pretend to know everything about everything, and technical departments fill up with a bunch of would be politicians who want to run the whole show themselves. Steve Jobs imagined Apple as an efficient hive of bees minding their own business, he didn’t want a herd of group thinking sheep following each other round the field. The sheep herd’s failure to specialize, to mind one’s own business, creates both muddled thinking and wasteful duplication. What has all this to do with economics and politics? What we are saying here is that rational expectations doesn’t work, the fundament capitalist idea that market price is the best measure of utility and competition is the best way to deliver it, is nonsense. The market price is just the sheep herds wavering opinion, and the stupidity of the herd derives from competitive duplication. In the same way democracy also fails.
These three arguments taken from the Apple-Microsoft example are insights into the wider debate swirling around the world today between the American and the Chinese economic models. Yet I am not suggesting authoritarian Apple should be boycotted in favour of democratic Windows/Linux. Pragmatism, not ideology, should guide our purchasing. I don't mean by that scientific thinking instead of artistic feeling. Just as the sight of a beautiful picture generates positive feelings, for many people computers are aesthetic objects that bring joy to their lives, these aesthetic feelings are not what I mean by ideological. For example, I love my iPhone so much I can cheer myself up just by looking at it or playing with the cool interface. Before the iPhone I had an old Nokia with a black & white display which, unlike modern mobiles, had no timeout. The long battery life, the functional display, and humble design were features I loved. Dogma and ideology are the refusal to open our mind to the choices before us and honestly compare relative merits with detachment. Plato argued that irrationality is inhibited love, this is why he described Socrates and Diptoma as living in a state of bliss, because they never allowed impurities to obscure the flow of understanding and lived in state of total love toward the good they perceived around them. Anyway, the Apple Microsoft debate is a fascinating one because it stirs up particularly passionate clouds of irrationality, much to delight of Apple's marketing team!
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As a final though I leave you with some interesting screenshots showing the evolution of an Apple and Windows application over the years. It’s exciting to watch the aesthetic progression of our GUIs and to wonder what future years will hold. My only fear, as a power user, is that Microsoft will put Apple style ease of use and aesthetics ahead of functionality - I hope they can always remain at least on a level pegging.
1991 Mac
For more information about the history of Windows, Apple, Apple OS etc: http://en.wikipedia.org
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