2 comments to “Blending the best of desktop and web app user experiences”

1. On Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 5:07 pm Dave Cortright wrote:

   Microsoft was certainly considering this when I was there. On the Mac team, we were impressed with SubEthaEdit, at the time the coolest of the real-time collaboration products. But ultimately the problem is that it would require a massive re-write of the basic code.

   The code architecture was designed in an era of a single user at a workstation. The entire guts of all the original Office programs are built around this assumption. According to the Dev managers, it wasn’t as simple as slapping a network layer on top of the “edit document” calls.

   Of course that begs the question of why Microsoft doesn’t do this. They have the resources to throw an entire team at a new, networked version of Office that is built from scratch for the new wired world. In fact Microsoft did this back in the “internet tidal wave” days with the NetDocs team (too far ahead of their time, apparently).

   From my now-outsider status, it seems that Microsoft has submitted to the error of focusing on the competition rather than the customer. They are trying to build web products that match the features of Google’s products, with a minor twist here or there (search, now featuring a logo with horrible typography!).

   I’m reminded of this quote from the book “Good to Great”, which I think sums it up nicely. “If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you’d be struck by the utter absence of talk about “competitive strategy.” Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.”

2. On Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 6:19 pm Philip Haine wrote:

   Thanks, David,

   Your comment reminds me of this:
   http://stealthisidea.com/articles/chase-customers/

Leave a Comment

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website