Windows 8 and Creating Rules

In light of the Windows 8 release today, I thought I'd share some thoughts from the perspective of upgrades. Yesterday, I upgraded from Outlook 2007 to the 2010 version. That's a three year difference for upgrading, updating, and coming up to speed on the nuances of, oh, say, network connectivity.

One of the first things I did was create a rule for an incoming e-mail and submit:



2 minutes? Yes, that's about how long it actually took. A 1/10 of second procedure (comparing to most client-server requests of a similar nature across the Internet) took almost 2 minutes. This was what it was like 2007 and all previous versions of Outlook I can remember, even before I started with my current company. It's frustrating that with an "new" update from 2007 to 2010 that Microsoft was not only unable to update the look and feel of this dialog, they didn't bother to improve the behind the scenes performance.

What does this have to with the Windows 8 release? Well, here's what I've noticed in my decades of working with Microsoft products. They fail to pay attention to these little details. What does two minutes mean to a leviathan like Microsoft? Nothing. What does it mean to me, the lowly user? Two minutes, plus the time it takes me to switch tasks back and forth as I wait and then check back to see if it's done, and the worry wondering if the application crashed and I'm going to have to waste ten minutes instead of two and so on. It means my time and productivity which are priceless.

What you typically see in Windows 8 reviews out on the 'tubes is the Metro skin all of its nifty tiles. But as far as I'm aware, the main, commonly used interface will actually be the same old desktop we're used to seeing and underneath the skin is the same old software. The same software that causes me to have to wait two minutes to send a few bytes of code to a server. More to the point, this attitude of missing the small details has been pervasive at Microsoft for decades. 

Companies are allowed, even expected, to make mistakes. The vaunted Apple has many a times, as has Sony (root kit!), Nokia, IBM, our rivals at Qualcomm (oh, and do I know what kind of mistakes they've made! Bad QC, no biscuit!) and more, but when a company's culture is so ingrained to only look at the superficial appearance and the profit motive, they are bound to fail time and time again, and on the same issues.

It gets harder to forgive Microsoft as they simply seem incapable of learning from their mistakes. Case in point: Three years and no fix for a simple problem: Make the "Create Rule" feature in Outlook faster and easier to use.

Before a company can upgrade its technology, it has to upgrade its relationship to its consumers. The conversation has to transform to a place where the small issues that affect the regular user are heard and replied to. 

And Microsoft hasn't done that with Outlook 2010, Vista, Windows 7, and now likely Windows 8. I look forward to the reviews and opportunity to try it out. Prove me wrong, Microsoft!

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