The Least Annoying Apps Will Win
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT
Back in the 80s and 90s when basic PC applications like word processors were being developed, there were a lot of holes in what they could do. Even rudimentary features like numbered lists, foreign character support and tables were often missing. So users frantically upgraded to each new release to gain new features they could actually use.
However, at some point, the new features stopped becoming useful to most people. Sure there would be a few esoteric new features that a small percentage of people would use, but for most users, these new features just made the programmer bigger, slower and harder to use. This was the age of feature bloat.
For the last few years, the leading applications have essentially stopped development. Sure Microsoft is adding improved sharing functionality and some other features like being able to create drop shadows to graphics in the upcoming Word 2007 but these won’t make any difference with how people use it day-to-day. More importantly, there there is no indication that Microsoft is working on fixing some of the problems that still plague their applications after 20 years of development, like Word’s bizarre way of handling headers and footers and inability to easily paste text without the formatting.
As long as users believe that the next version of a program might fix some of the things that annoy them, they are likely to stick with it. But what happens when all hope is lost that these things will ever be fixed and they are still constantly annoyed everyday doing just rudimentary tasks? What will happen then is that many people will look for alternatives.
What about advance features? What about the ability to embed mathematic equations or generate a table of contents from multi-part documents? Won’t people have to stick to the high-end applications to have access to advanced features such as these? Well certainly, some people will for some documents. But most day-to-day use doesn’t require these features but instead just the ability to bang out a memo, a quick letter or a blog entry.
Another influencing factor is Web based writing, like web sites, wikis and blogs. These generally don’t offer a lot of fancy features so users make do with things like predefined headers, bold text, lists and inserted pictures. So instead of fancy two-column formatting that can be done with word processors, people are getting used to the simpler Web formatting.
What does all this mean? It means that people will start using basic applications that are less annoying than what they are using now, even if they don’t have as many features. This will open up the door for alternatives like OpenOffice, AbiWord, Google Write and Google Spreadsheet that some experts are saying don’t have a chance because they don’t do everything the traditional, heavyweight apps do.