Summary
New businesses, especially tech-startups are increasingly leaving behind the Microsoft Suite altogether. They find the software unfriendly and increasingly cumbersome. Microsoft has increased the complexity and decreased the stability of the overall suite over the past 10 years.
Analysis
First, let me clarify that I am not against Microsoft products at all and I use many of them every day on my main computer.
Everywhere there are firms hard at work making web applications and software applications that are usable and that work for the average user. Examples include Twitter and Wordpress. Microsoft is simply not one of those companies. Their product design focus is on adding arcane functions and adding complexity for the expert user. Unfortunately, stability and adoption suffer from the strategy.
To compare, just consider Firefox. The article states that Firefox is used by 17% of web users. That is a huge number considering that Firefox does not come installed on new computers but IE and Netscape are pre-installed. That means that 17% of users went out and downloaded Firefox. Why? User experience. Word of mouth. Stability. Security. No pop-ups. It's easy to understand and modify the settings.
The feature called "Activities" sounds incompatible and likely incompatible with basic web design. The eBay search function also seems off-topic and puzzling. As for being able to "save work done on a Web site to the local
computer when an Internet connection goes down" how often does this happen really?
On Microsoft's Silverlight 2 website they have a quote posted that
"S&P 500 companies focused on User Experience design calculated a
tenfold advantage in stock-market returns" (Fast Company 10/2007 Peer
Insight). I would be happy too if Microsoft Word and IE became products that I WANT to use rather than HAVE to use.
Until that major change in direction comes, developers and increasingly, consumers will only reluctantly rely on these tough products. The barrier to use is simply too high, and the word on the street is that Vista and probably IE 8 represent a plunge into uncertainty that few are willing to take.
