Microsoft Dubs iPhone 4 as Apple's 'Windows Vista'

[candrwhite]

[citation][nom]dman3k[/nom]So what Microsoft product is worse than Apple's security?[/citation]

Hmmm... ya got me there.

 

[Guest]

I came upon this web page by chance and these comments are an absolute riot to read. I am neither an Apple nor Microsoft fanboy, but the bias of the comments on this page toward Microsoft is comical, to say the least, and closer to simply surreal.

Apple's most recent mistakes are the exceptions that prove the rule. Nobody at Microsoft would would take this opportunity to bash Apple if Apple hadn't already set such a high bar for itself on the product elegance and usability front. That a Microsoft exec can call the iPhone 4 "Apple's Vista" and believe that the statement reflects more poorly on Apple than it does on Microsoft is a true testament to how out-of-touch Microsoft management is with typical user reality.

While Microsoft has made great strides over the years in their user-focused design, they still lag far, far behind Apple in their attention to the customer experience, despite the millions (billions?) spent on "experience labs" and such.

Let me try to back this up with a few examples of how Microsoft has impeded my progress just the past DAY:

1) Excel--all Excel objects on a worksheet allow you to right-click on an object/shape to change the properties of whether the object is "Moved/sized with the underlying cell." But not Chart objects. Those properties are not included when you right click a chart object. So what do you do if you want to change the "Move/size" properties? Well, you go searching on Google to find out where Microsoft "hid" these properties from someone who has already wasted hours of their life figuring it out.

2) In VBA for Excel, you can program interface controls to respond to a "Click" event. It's particularly useful when checking to see if someone clicked on a listbox. Except for one issue: if you set a property of the listbox that allows multiple selection, then Excel VBA completely IGNORES the event. No, it doesn't give a warning or error message--it completely ignores an action that you have every right to expect it to respond to. So is this information located anywhere in the VBA "ListBox" documentation included with Excel? No. Time wasted trying to figure out why code doesn't work: HOURS. I even posted to a discussion group and the Excel MVP didn't notice the problem.

3) Microsoft has multiple forums that allow logging on with the same "Windows Live ID." The threads you've started will only show up if you've logged into the correct forum--each of which has several possible login screens (i.e., it's not always obvious which forum you logged into). So, if I post a thread on the MSDN Excel Developer's forum, my profile won't show threads that I've started on the Excel Office forum...despite the fact that I'm using the exact same login ID for both forums. And, more importantly, despite the fact that, as a user, my concern is not which forum I've logged into, but rather the subject of my post.

4) On the operating system front, in my "rock solid" [sic] copy of Windows 7, the Windows Explorer crashed numerous times because I made the egregious error of trying to add a subdirectory to a particular area on my hard drive. I guess I should be thankful. It simply closed the program and re-started it rather than bringing down the entire computer.

My point is not to gain your sympathy, nor simply to bash Microsoft. It's to say that problems (1)-(3) just do not happen when a company is more concerned with User Experience than technical and organizational issues (or, perhaps, profit centers).

Again, I'm not an Apple Fanboy. I have one piece of Apple technology--the iPhone 3GS--and have been reasonably pleased with it's usability. But it's foolish not to give Apple the props they deserve for making products that non-techie (and many techie) people love.

But I'm incredulous at the support that Microsoft gets in these comments, especially when considering how far ahead Apple is in making usable technology for non-techies. You may scoff at the people who are Apple fanatics, but the mere fact that they exist speaks volumes regarding Apple's customer focus--and Microsoft's relative lack thereof.

 

[beayn]

[citation][nom]DavidStHubbins[/nom] You may scoff at the people who are Apple fanatics, but the mere fact that they exist speaks volumes regarding Apple's customer focus--and Microsoft's relative lack thereof.[/citation]

Didn't you just comment about how biased toward Microsoft some of the people here were? There are most definitely fanboys for both sides. I think the main difference between the two is that the Apple ones believe their products are completely infallible, while (usually) Microsoft ones do not.

For example, I was on an Apple fanboy site one time where several mac users were attempting to combine their crash statistics so they could show up a windows fanboy. Some of them said their Macs never crashed, some said theirs crashed but when they got a new one, it was fine. One guy said that his crashed all the time, but he soon discovered that it was only from removing the USB memory stick while it was sleeping. He disqualified that as a crash since he figured out it was "really just user error causing the crash".

It was a clear bug in the OS that caused his crash yet he disqualified it. That is usually how a fanboy thinks. Problems in Windows are always blamed on Windows regardless of the cause. Drivers, apps, doesn't matter, it's always Windows.

Not only this, but the other users who claimed theirs crashed but they bought a new one and it was fine were completely ignoring the fact that they had a mac that was garbage to begin with and it was fully justified to simply buy an entirely new computer to fix the problems. They still regarded their experiences as flawless because of the NEW Mac they had.

All that said, you can still find many similar problems with Apple stuff that you listed from Microsoft.

For example, I wanted to move Apple Quicktime's download folder to a different hard drive so that it wouldn't waste writes on my SSD. It absolutely does not allow you to change such folders forcing 100's of megs of writes to your user profile while only allowing you to move your "settings" folder, which is all of 200kb.

One example among many. "Nobody is perfect" is the whole point. You just can't argue that with an Apple fanboy though.

 

[Guest]

beayn, you make legitimate points about the Apple fans who seem to have "drunk the Kool-Aid." There are very few things in life as annoying as arrogance, regardless of whether it comes from individuals, companies, or governments.

I find the discussion of usability and user experience to be an interesting one, and one that I would like to distinguish from that of "features."

For example, if a piece of software doesn't let me do task "X"---even if it is something "obviously" useful, or something present in competitor's products--then I don't have a problem with it as a customer focus issue, as long as the software quickly tells me it doesn't do "X" or provides me a way to determine that it can't do "X" (and better yet, is proactive about telling me that it doesn't do "X" and tells me why).

Whether or not it does "X" then just boils down to a feature implementation decision, and a company can have legitimate reasons for allowing or not allowing "X".

I can't speak to the specifics of your Quicktime download folder issue, but if Apple made it easy for you to figure out that you cannot move your Quicktime download folder, then it's certainly a nuisance/disappointment, but that's where it ends. On the other hand, if Apple didn't make it easy for you to determine whether or not you could accomplish this task, then it descends into what I consider to be far worse--a frustration, aggravation, and more to the point, a time-waster.

(I'm curious how much time it took you to determine whether you could accomplish the task or not.)

What drives me crazy is when task "X" is a reasonable thing for a user to want to do, but the software either (1) doesn't acknowledge through the interface that the user rightly would want to do "X", (2) doesn't make it clear whether "X" can be done at all, (3) provides and environment where it appears to allow "X", but actually doesn't, (4) makes it very difficult to figure out how to do "X", (5) provides a method of doing "X" that is inconsistent with the overall software look-and-feel, so that it takes much longer to do "X" than it should, etc.

The bottom line for me is this. I can tolerate when a piece of technology doesn't allow me to do "X". I am intolerant of technology that wastes my time as I either (1) try to figure out whether I can do "X", or (2) actually accomplish "X".

So, this explains why I, like some other posters here, can respect the limitations of a "closed" technology; it may be closed, and not allow you to accomplish everything that you want to do, but what it does allow you to do, you can do *very efficiently*.

And as far as I'm concerned, technologies designed for user efficiency show respect for the user; inefficient technologies do not.

My impression and experience has been that--generally speaking, though there are obviously plenty of individual exceptions to be found--Apple technologies show more respect of this kind of efficiency than those from Microsoft.

Again, I'm not interested in an Apple vs. Microsoft flame war...I'm just trying to clarify the basis for my earlier comments that were more positive toward Apple than Microsoft.

 

[beayn]

DavidStHubbins - I see your point about 'X' and agree with it. Sometimes I don't know why Microsoft does the things it does. I personally can't stand Excel and Word because of those things you mention.

When I was first learning to program in college, I used Microsoft Visual Studio. It took me a week to complete a project for a video game within the studio. I manage to get a copy of Borland C Builder from a friend and did the exact same thing in less than a day. It was just so much easier to find things, just a much better done environment.

Despite that, MS Visual Studio won the war, and with my experience in using both, it most definitely wasn't because it was better.

In my experiences with Macs, I didn't find them any better in terms of advanced options. In fact, those features were even more well hidden than on Windows.

I agree as well that Macs are definitely designed for the non-tech savvy person and they do that job well. As you pointed out as well, this can be a bad thing for anyone who might need to do something with that system that goes beyond what it was designed for. Advanced options are hard to find or non-existent. They spend so much time making it "easy" that they forget sometimes people don't want to do it that way.

That's where I prefer products other than Apple products (not necessarily Microsoft stuff either). They're easier to fix, easier to configure and easier to use because of those configuration options.

 

[zaznet]

The only problem with the Vista analogy is that the iPhone 4 is selling very well and is quite popular despite the obvious problem with reception.

The comparison seems weak and the promise to deliver WP7 without the same issue is baseless since they are talking about a mobile OS and not a physical device. Comparing the iOS 4 to WP7 would show Apple well out in front even with a limited number of supported physical devices.