Microsoft’s Folly.

A little is good, more is better, most is best.

Whatever happened to those halcyon days of computing? When your basic home computer had 1K of memory and the extra RAM was a luxury? Like most people I guess, I am constantly amazed by just how much more computer one’s money buys this year than last. And, to an extent, I appreciate the utility of the technology advancement. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether somewhere along the line we lost the plot. Extra power and extra memory has resulted in software which has extra features that I think we don’t need. Not only do we not need them: many of these features make our software more complex and our computers harder to use.

At this years Comdex, the world’s largest computer exhibition and conference Bill Gate’s keynote address stressed that computers are currently too complex, and that Microsoft was making efforts to reduce that complexity.

Well it is good that the head of Microsoft recognizes that there is a problem with the level of complexity inherent in the systems that they deliver, but I have no faith in Microsoft’s ability to deliver a less complex system.

Rather Microsoft have been at the forefront of the drive to provide us with features that we don’t need and that often don’t work. For example, I find the inclusion of a "grammar checker" and a "auto summarize", neither of which work in any useful way, in Word ’97 to be amusing but otherwise pointless.

It is of course popular and trendy to criticize Microsoft. In particular, Microsoft critics decry the lack of innovation at Microsoft: they don’t invent they merely steal ideas. But I think the role of taking a good idea, and doing something good with it is a useful and worthy role within the business world. Sure Microsoft’s Windows offers little that is new, but why should it? I think the riches of rewards should go to those who deliver what the users want and need. So, I don’t criticize Microsoft for their lack of creativity. I do question the wisdom of the whole approach to software development on the PC, an approach to which they have been the major contributor. Bill Gates proudly repeats time and again how the success of various products, from Excel to Explorer has been based upon a corporate strategy of matching and then exceeding the functionality provided by competitor’s products.

In essence I believe software should be no more complex to use than the task warrants. Further, simplicity is not something that spontaneously arises out of a product, rather it has to be designed in from the start. As the design changes, the commitment to simplicity of use needs to be preserved otherwise that simplicity will vanish. I don’t think either of these points should be controversial.

Yet, with each new title and each new release that enters the Microsoft product line, Microsoft demonstrate the misapprehension that simplicity is something that can be added to software in the same way a coat of paint can be added to a house.

One can no more add simplicity, than one can add quality. The reality is that there are some traits of an artifact that if required must be designed in from the start.

I think Microsoft have done amazingly well at providing a nice user interface, that appears to gloss over much of the inherent complexity that underlies their products, be it Word, Windows, Project, Visual C++ or almost anything else from their extensive range. But this is just the gloss that attempts to hide the vast underlying complexity of the software package. Just underneath that slick user interface there still lies a very complex system. Stray from the beaten path and you will often find yourself fighting against a system that rigidly refuses to allow you to fulfill a perfectly reasonable request, or perhaps attempts to lead you off in the direction it blindly believes you ought to go.

While "wizards" or talking paper clips are nice gimmicks, they are not a substitute for a product that has been designed to be simple. Worse in fact, they themselves add complexity. And here we are at the heart of the matter. Microsoft’s goal might be to make their product simple, yet their approach involves adding complexity at every opportunity. Achieving simplicity through adding complexity? Am I the only one who sees a conflict here? Each new release of a Microsoft product builds on the accomplishments of a previous product, making it more polished and adding new functionality. While this doubtless makes it easier to market the newly improved product, none of this addresses the goal of simplicity. I should also add that each new Microsoft product also gratuitously changes an arbitrary number of conventions, widgets, and features for small gain, but with significant confusion, disruption and irritation to the user community.

In the beginning, when computers served the primary purpose of keeping the room warm, with a by product of being able to perform some moderately complex calculations slightly quicker than humans, there was a belief that in software, small was not so much beautiful, as essential. Alas, the software world quickly lost sight of this truth. My first suspicion that the software world was going mad happened in 1988 when I first used a program called Harvard Graphics, a package for producing slides – consider it a forerunner to Microsoft Presentations. Harvard Graphics included a spell checker. This isn’t to malign the functionality of a spell checker. But it was the first example I saw of blatant mission creep in software. After Harvard Graphics trend setting example had oiled the slope, other products slid down into the all-things-for-all-people tar pit that resulted in the gross examples of software bloat that infest the hard disks of today’s personal computers. From Harvard Graphics humble beginnings, the computer industry then embraced word processors with built in graphics packages and operating systems with built in speech synthesizers, and before I knew it the world had gone mad.

Undoubtedly, part of what drives the increased complexity of software is the increased price to power performance ratio of today’s desktop machines. "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away." Yet while I don’t doubt that marketing moguls sit around corporate offices dreaming of what this increased power of computing allows their new product variant to achieve, I wonder whether anyone ever asks whether they should strive to make these achievements.

It is my belief that we need a new paradigm for computing. One based upon making the software we use simple, powerful and flexible, rather than feature-packed and pretty. Such an approach would make our software cheaper, more reliable and more productive. It probably wouldn’t make Microsoft as much money, but I think I could live with that.

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since March 10, 1998.