Author: Daniel Clausen
Date: 08:28:43 06/11/02
Go up one level in this thread
Hi The reply Roy quoted surely comes from someone who thought about the matter and doesn't just want to start a flame war. Sheesh, I wish I could write such posts with so much focus and well-thought-out things. Nevertheless I don't agree with everything (s)he said. [snip] >They do not see the obvious usability flaws in the interfaces they design; >instead, they just accept things they way they are and think that such >problems are normal. Heh. Reminds me the typical Windows user. (no pun intended - please stop beating me :) [snip] >Add in the time to retrieve the device from pocket/bag/etc, and turn it on and >wait for the screen to be drawn. If the amount of time is too high, the device >no longer saves you time, it wastes it, and there's really no reason to use >it. Since when do people judge such things based on the 'usefulness'? I'm still amazed that so many people get excited about sending short messages to other people on way-too-small devices with way-too-small keyboards (with 3-4 letters on one key). Still, almost everyone seems to use these devices. People usually go for what blinks, makes sounds and has lots of buttons. After some years the competitors with the better product (in terms of usability) vanished from the market because they're less flashy. And at that time the industry will finally start to think about usability. Shoot. :p [snip] >Yet the people at Microsoft seem not to understand this; again, I believe that >it is because the people driving these project are engineers and developers >who are used to dealink with slow, unintuitive interfaces, and love computers >so much that it makes up for any time they waste on them. I think they understand this very well. Or why do you think did they get 95% of the PC market? (I admit it's a bit unfair to ask questions since the guy won't read them here :p) [snip] >I have heard that when MS-Word was still competing against WordPerfect and >AmiPro, the Word group kept two charts on their wall: sales of WordPerfect vs >Word, and a feature checklist of Word vs. WordPerfect. They kept working until >they achieved feature parity with WordPerfect. While they may have come up >with one or two novel features, the central driving force of their development >process was their competition's feature checklist. But it seems that this strategy was very successful. I got an email with an attachment this morning - want to guess whether it was an M$Word, AmiPro or WordPerfect document? ;) [snip] >Handheld computers must be trivial to use; the "killer feature" is the ability >to help you quickly do something else in the real-world -- not be a "cool toy" >which is useful to themselves (there are exceptions to this of course but this >seems to be true most of the time). Again, this is true for a technology with 'settles'. New technology has to be flashy in the beginning or it won't be successful at all. The main things Java was used in the beginning was for flashy animations in the Web. As if Java's main advantage was graphics.. Ok, now that M$ decided to drop Java it won't matter anymore anyways. The fight Palm vs PPC is not over yet, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Palm wouldn't exist in 2 years from now on. (or only has about 5% market share :) And I will be the first to post here "I've told you so!" in 2 years - of course I will mark the thread as OT. =) Sargon
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