Hardware Fatalism and the Burden of Ownership

The general meme for the last year in tech punditry is that the tablet form factor is taking over the PC market, and iPad in specific will wipe Microsoft's desk/laptop domination off the personal computing map.  Forgetting the inherent bias of a Microsoft Certified Partner talking about OS platform predictions, it's worth noting Jakob Nielsen's article this week on platform development futures. Jakob's book on web usability is still one that I pull down from the shelf when I'm thinking about the best way to engage customers digitally.

Jakob's point about designing and developing for multiple platforms in the face of iOS or Android's inevitability as the winner-take-all platform is a poignant one.  Almost 20 years after the courts found against Microsoft for monopolistic behavior, we finally have a truly heterogenous environment that all the application developers, hardware manufacturers, and customers said they wanted. Take a moment and breathe in what that feels like.

I'm for it - and I think we all are - the mobile headstart that Apple has had with the app store really drove interesting competition from Android and from Microsoft (with its Windows Phone 7).  All three of these platforms have a high degree of customer usability and very different models of supporting various ISVs' business models.  A strongly competitive environment decreases the burden of ownership for the consumer, and increases the complexity of design, documentation, and support. You have to educate your customers and ISV partners before, during, and after their platform "conversion."

Content strategy becomes even more important to having complex customer conversations. You can see in this very long, but also very rich Build keynote from Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft where they needed to be able to tell not just the software vendor story to their audience, but also to showcase the wow of the new Metro interface and Metro development platform. Windows no longer automatically connotes the entirety of the consumer computing marketplace. You can't showcase cool developer tools if the developers don't trust your ability to deliver on an interactive UI that will resonate with the users. The result is that Microsoft has regrouped to present a very interesting, strategic, and consumer-focused operating system that they can showcase from several perspectives. As a consumer and as a partner, I'm excited to watch what happens next. And that's the opposite of fatalism.