Ask Paul: February 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy (early) Valentine’s Day. Here’s a new edition of Ask Paul to kick off the holiday weekend a bit early...

ErichK asks:

Hi Paul. My question today is, what type of balance do you think Microsoft should take with Windows as far as making it accessible to users on the entire spectrum? That is, normal, every-day people, and techies and power users. For example, something like a terminal or command line (in any OS, not just Windows) needs to be there for those people that need it, but I assure you it would scare the hell out of people like my mother.

This is the double-edged sword of Windows: Because it has such a large and diverse user base, the story goes, Microsoft has to design multiple ways to accomplish different tasks. We’ve kind of just accepted that on faith over the years, and back when Windows was 95 percent of personal computing, it was kind of hard to argue otherwise.

Except that even Microsoft discovered this wasn’t true. Very early on, Microsoft adapted all of its major Office desktop applications to have nearly identical toolbars and menus when possible, the theory being that a user who mastered one app (Word, perhaps) would more easily adapt to another (like Excel). This, too, was taken on faith. But when Microsoft finally did so usability studies on this topic, what they found was that users were smarter than they were credited for. They could easily adapt to app-specific UIs. Making the menus/toolbars (and later the ribbons) very similar didn’t really help all that much.

But we now have other large and non-Microsoft platforms that prove these points. Apple has been very aggressive about moving forward with new features and UIs, and in dropping old features and UIs. And there are now over 1 billion iPhone users worldwide and a total installed base of 1.65 billion people. And none of Apple’s platforms provide two ways to do anything (for the most part, and via the GUI). If a feature exists, Apple provides one way to use it. So Windows could too.

(Yes, Apple has made its platform more visually similar in recent years too. But this is more about look and feel than it is about muscle memory.)

And also, how do these differences get manifested feature-wise? I'd like to think normal people understand the basics of using a GUI by now, but I'm always surprised by things that people don't know. For example, there was one time I was helping my mom's friend with her laptop, and I showed her how you can drag an item with the mouse to the recycle bin. She had no idea that could be done. Are we only going to reach parity when we have a Star Trek world where you can interact with the computer with natural language and it understands everything we say like a sentient being?

Sure, but we won’t be using traditional form factor PCs when that happens. :)

As to how Microsoft might solve this problem in Windows ... I don’t feel that they will. Microsoft is a lot of things, but one of ...