The Seattle PI has a great reprint of one of Bill Gates Windows usability critiques aimed at his employees (via Daring Fireball). This was made available thanks to the antitrust hearings years ago, so it’s the real deal. It’s an interesting read — if you have ever been frustrated by downloading a Windows patch or application from Microsoft then you should especially read it.

Mr. Gates is dead on in his critique. The sad thing is that his comments were made in 2003 and my personal experience is that these usability issues have not actually been fixed.

Seriously.

Here’s a great example coming from my personal experience:

Microsoft bought a small company called iView Multimedia and re-branded their core product iView as Expression Media and added it to a larger suite of similar products. The transition to Microsoft was completed over a period of six months - at the end of that time iView’s web presence was frozen and pointed to the new Microsoft product page. Additionally new user and support forums were set up.

Expression Media itself then went through a series of patches and updates most of which were nearly impossible to find if you didn’t frequent the support forums (Do most users have time to “live” in a forum? I think not.). Then they added Expression Media to the Microsoft AutoUpdate program which made keeping up with the frequent bug fixes a dream come true. I was like “yay!”.

Time passed and Microsoft revamped the software to version 2.0, a paid update. No announcement was made via email (I was on the iView list for such things, what happened to that?). Getting the software to try out for 30 days or purchase required clicking through several pages of links just to download something - I almost gave up.

At this same time it turned out that the Expression Media team released a “post” service pack update to Expression Media 1.x that fixed some awkward bugs. This is a nice gesture considering the paid update superseding the prior version. Again, I was like “yay!”.

The thing is, even with the auto update checking feature in Expression Media 1.x this SP1 patch never showed up. I found out about it by accident while I was reviewing user feedback on the 2.0 release. Again, most users in the target market aren’t going to be able to find an important patch even though a built-in update checker exists. To this is misleading with an end result of a bad customer experience.

I would appendix the above that prior to Microsoft buying iView Multimedia it was a breeze to hit the product web site and get to downloading. When the acquisition was announced the usual justifications were made, my favorite being that the team would benefit from the large resources that Microsoft offered as far as testing and development. These resources did little to help the user get to the product, much less keep it updated.

After watching an internal Microsoft promotion video about the acquuisition (warning Silverlight plug-in required to view), I began to feel that the iView team was a fish out of water within the Microsoft culture. Some of that is because Expression Media is still a cross-platform application as iView was, but it’s not handled by the (infamous?) Macintosh Business Unit as the Mac version of Office is. Basically this is not normal for Microsoft and clearly they don’t entirely know how to present it.

In summary, a small focused company gets acquired and is buried in an existing complex system where getting patches or even basic product information is far more work than the average Internet user would expect. How does Microsoft expect to maximize sales of the Expression Media product when it continues to clutter the usability of it’s product information and support the same way it has with Windows? Seriously, even if I didn’t work on interface design for web pages I could see how awkward this is. Reading Mr. Gates email from 2003 only adds concern to these issues.

Though the iPhone 3G is going to be the buzz for a while, Apple’s other WWDC announcement of pausing to do a proper optimization of OS X is great news as well.

First, from what I can see this wasn’t being demanded from users and developers, however all software benefits from some cleanup and optimization. Of course new features drive sales which is why you never hear an operating system sold this way. So Apple is breaking a few rules doing this. The price is as yet unannounced and we’re all hoping it’s half the cost of a full OS X update (or even free, which is doubtful).

Even though Snow Leopard is not about new features it actually has some core functions that basically are new features to me - notably Quicktime X, OpenCL, full native Exchange support and lots of improvements to core OS services like multi-core management. There aren’t a lot of details but I suspect after this weeks WWDC is wrapped more will be divulged.

Quicktime X is hopefully a long overdue re-write to what is essentially still a ported Carbon codebase. Honesty I cannot imagine what my work would be like without Quicktime - it’s been a powerful technology that has been overlooked over the years. I especially love old comparisons of Windows Media Player to Quicktime Player that never once even recognize that Quicktime is a set of APIs and the player is not what it’s all about. WMP plays stuff, but you could record and edit a feature with special effects in Quicktime if you knew how. Before OS X, Quicktime languished for a while until the iPod/iTunes boom, but even then the radical new features that Quicktime 3.x had at the time still seem great when compared to subsequent updates. Apple has brought Quicktime into it’s current 7.x incarnation pretty well despite the aging foundation it has, but there is more room to grow here.

Mostly I applaud an honest acknowledgement that the next revision is all about polishing and optimization. This will pay off in the long term and Apple seems to know it. It will also give developers a bit more time with the Leopard chapter which is good since many of the new features in Leopard are under the hood and not so evident to a user.

Update:

Gruber over at Daring Fireball seems to agree on the “no new features” not being entirely accurate.

I’ve uploaded my obscure classic music video for friends Neon Brown to Vimeo to see how it compared to YouTube. I’ve gotta say, Vimeo is pretty slick.

Neon Brown - Tipping The Fridge from Eric Peacock on Vimeo.

Great logo for an interesting new Apple WebKit Javascript interpreter, Squirrelfish:

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.

Sounds great. Safari/WebKit has been making great strides in the past year or so.

…Windows.

An interesting survey regarding how computer users show off their gadgets reveals what Daring Fireball’s Gruber summarizes as:

“…most people who don’t care deeply about their computers use Windows”

Here’s the article over at Electronisa.

Like one commenter also said, I’ve yet to see anyone with a Zune and nobody I know has bought one.

I live in Seattle and all my Microsoft-employed friends got free Xbox 360s when those shipped, but none of them have a Zune.

This is a an interesting look at all the current digital video formats we have to choose from in regards to quality. Results are based on stills, which doesn’t really say much compared to watching this on your own HD screen, but this is worth a look nevertheless.

Author Steven Poole on the results of his making a book freely available.

There does exist a proposal that purports to be of type a). I’ll call it, for short, “the Slashdot argument”. It says that books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed. What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can’t earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you’re one of those musicians who plays live),4 or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of “value-added” service. Many such arguments seem to me to be simple greed disguised in high-falutin’ idealism about how “information wants to be free”. Perhaps it’s not empty pedantry to point out that “information” doesn’t want anything in and for itself. The information in which humans traffic is created by humans. And most information-creating humans need to earn dollars or yuan to survive.

I wish everyone would read this. As an artist and musician I’ve experienced the attitude that my music or art should be free, even before the Internet had taken off. In fact I’ve never had expectations to make a living from it because no matter how good I might get at doing it I rarely ever see anyone willing to pay for it.