Microsoft is doomed.
I say this not just because of what I learned in a recent Vanity Fair article about the idiotic way the company has been run for the last decade—under CEO Steve Ballmer, management institutionalized the most productivity- and morale-destroying system imaginable, a mandatory bell-curve performance-rating system for the employees within every unit. (No matter how well a unit does, most of the team must be mediocre, and someone must be rated failing.) Such an organism cannot live.
But I also know that Microsoft is dying because of the way its software, whose stench I breathe all day since I started a new job, reeks.
Of course I’m writing this using Word, a program I’m used to, so it doesn’t seem so bad. But really? It is. (WordPerfect—remember?—was much better.) As the great Louis Menand once wrote in The New Yorker, “It is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.” Until you have to do something complicated in it, Word is adequate. Irritating, of course—did any user in history ever accept the “Special Delivery” suggestion that pops up when you type “Special”?—but OK enough.
However, as soon as you try to do something more complex than updating a résumé using a Microsoft product, you’re dumped into a scratchy, itchy underworld of grotesque interface design and inexplicable glitches. Take it from me: Building emails and Web pages using Outlook and SharePoint is like playing a perverse, boring video game that’s all traps and puzzles, and no rewards. After an hour of taking a table out of a SharePoint page (Ctrl Z, over and over again), adjusting it in Word or Outlook, pasting it back in and relinking the images, the very best I can expect is that the page won’t look that bad.
In the meantime, I’ve had to contend with blurry little buttons that rearrange themselves on the toolbar between one environment and another; tools that are available over there, but missing where I need them (Surprise! No font size control for you here, Missy!); tables that resize themselves; images that have to be positioned using text-formatting buttons, because the image-positioning buttons only work now and then; and a process for creating an “Add to Outlook” link requiring 13 separate steps—during the course of which, if you hit the “Descending Order” option on the “Modified” button before counting to three, your sort goes wrong, and you have to back up two steps.
I am not making any of this up. Thirteen steps.
This endless scramble is only made more painful by the contrast with the other software I use. Moving over from Office to Photoshop or InDesign is like stumbling out of the bug-infested underbrush and slipping into a cool, clear pool of beautiful, intuitive design. Adobe products, made by designers for designers, help you do things. They’re big programs that take a while to learn, but the people who make them work hard to make everything as easy as possible. And, oh my God! Adobe help actually answers your questions! (In the latest version of Outlook, the help button has been hidden away under File. I take this as a tacit acknowledgement of the truth that if you need help with a Microsoft product, you’d best go straight to Google.)
All that is keeping the company I work for from switching to something else is the expense and scale of the job of moving huge databases into a better platform. At some point, someone will add up the sheer time wasted across the company by employees having to dick around with Microsoft—the time wasted by the employees of companies all over the world, every hour of the day—and it will be over.
The Vanity Fair article ends with a fascinating observation made by Steve Jobs about Bill Gates, and, ultimately, about his company: “He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.”
Admittedly, Bill Gates has become a deeply admirable philanthropist, while I haven’t heard that Jobs ever gave anyone a dime. Yet there’s something profound in the difference that Jobs has pointed out here.
Where beauty is not appreciated, there will never be true usefulness. Without art, all you get is a kludge.
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2012.
I’ve got to agree with the prior poster. Adobe PS has a difficult learning curve and I find that I’m having to constantly go to Google and You Tube for tips. However, my feeling is that there’s a HUGE opportunity being missed. If developers can find a way to take programs that are inherently complex and really find a way to simplify their use, then I’m on board with that.
Very interesting comments about Photoshop. Adobe has been very successful with its products, but for anyone who wants to really get a program that is far better than Word or Photoshop or – without even the slightest question – any iteration of Adobe’s ‘InDesign’ that was supposed to replace Pagemaker, find an ancient copy of that program! Pagemaker in the early stages was in fact the ‘simplified’ program that northstar is searching for. Its problem is that it was written for the Mac and the world switched to the PC – and transferring PM to the PC brought in some clunkiness that induced some frustration. However, rather than cleaning up that inadequate transfer attempt, Adobe ditched the whole idea and made InDesign, a powerful, feature-laden program that does fine if you have the time and energy to figure it out, but is useless for most folks.
What truly amazes me is that the clearly frustrated users, like Renée, of the clearly inferior Microsoft OS, were actually introduced and were nurtured by the clearly superior Apple OS.
Back in my day, almost all the school systems in the US of A, introduced kids on how to love and use computers via the Apple OS.
But what really amazes me, even more, is that I keep reading that the Apple OS is only good for creative folk.
Which means, I am guessing, that Microsoft OS has been reserved only for dolts?
CEO’s are NOT about the company they lead. They are about what’s for them in salary, benefits, pension, stock options and the payment they get when they depart the company, whether fired or retired. This is what a CEO is about. Most CEOs don’t stay with any company long enough to make a different. Many have left within a year after taking control. but you notice they always leave with a big severance package, stock options, pension, etc. This is what the CEO is about. I have worked with some and I know what motivates them. Some CEO’s don’t even have any experience in the company they are leading. So CEOs are not motivated to make a company successful, more profitable, Its the money they will be banking.
Gracias, “interested guy.”
But please forgive me when I must observe that what you posted was more than a bit off topic.
I completely agree with the first poster. Microsoft Word is a great application that does a lot. That might be its only problem, it does too much. Course, most successful applications have gotten bloated over the years.
Usually people who “hate” on Microsoft have become an Apple minion and can’t see the truth anyway. Apple is a closed system that does not allow for hardly any customization of their products. They give you what they think (no, not think, say) is good “for the masses”.
Therefore, you have a product that no matter how many people own an iPhone, iPod, and iPad, they all look the same and have the same boring home screen. Thank goodness for companies like Microsoft (and particularly Google) that allow us to make the product our own and have our individuality branded on it.
Mike, you can’t be serious when you wrote: “Thank goodness for companies like Microsoft (and particularly Google) that allow us to make the product our own and have our individuality branded on it.”
Come on, dear fellow — give in.
Because there’s no company anywhere in the entire universe that is more dedicated to making a product “our own,” than Apple.
As proof, every time I’ve tried to use a neighbor’s Microsoft-run PC, may I ask you – how come it looks exactly like the other ones I’ve seen? (Which, I must say, is also very messy and almost unusable.)
As for your claim that Apple does “not allow for hardly any customization of their products.”
False. Totally false.
What you write is something written by someone who has yet to explore the world’s best, most accessible, innovative, and adaptable operating system.
One that Microsoft and Google are trying, unsuccessfully, very hard to emulate.
May I offer another proof? Check out the stock price of Apple. Then, check out the stock price of Microsoft.
You are, dear fellow, so far behind the reality of what’s really happening in the tech world.
If I were you, I’d take my PC to the town dump and then head off to the nearest Apple store.
If Apple is such an open and wonderful environment for people to do their own thing, then how come the following rules exist:
1) You can only develop apps for iOS devices on a Mac, no other platform
2) You can only deploy iOS apps through the Apple store
3) You have ONE platform to develop iOS apps on
If you as a user, maybe its fine. If you are a application developer their rules and requirements are far beyond stiffling.
riorican, Give in like a lemming…never.
My dear friend…I’m leaps and bounds ahead of you in the tech world.
I happen to be a developer and have developed on many systems. Apple is the most closed system I have ever encountered! I’m glad when you go to use a computer that someone else has, and the supposed mess they have their screen…it is their own individuality showing up. Some desktops are messy, some are clean like mine.
And by the way…I’m talking about the iPod, iPad, and iPhone.
Can you change the icons to be different? Can you make the more important ones bigger? NO! In the current windows Nokia phone, you can. In the Surface tablet that will come out soon, you can! And speaking of desktops, in the Windows 8 desktop, you can. Apple gives you a square icon and they say that is what you need.
Stock price is no proof of a company’s skill to build a better product. One time, 1999 I think, Microsoft bailed out Apple with a nice loan to keep them from going under. If Apple (as the minions have said) has always been the better company, why did they need Microsoft to bail them out? Look it up.
Customize your iPad to have some of the squares to be bigger than others. Put some individuality into your iPad and send me a screen shot…it cannot be done.
In the midst of all the political back-biting of recent on-line commenting, this thread was a breath of fresh-air.
My favorite quote of Steve Jobs was to President Obama: You have to fix American education and you should start by squashing the teachers’ unions.
You think Outlook is bad try Lotus Notes. Outlook blows Lotus away. And I love my excel unabashedly.