Microsoft's New Mantra - It Just Works 985
bonch writes "Fortune has a story about Microsoft's new philosophy--'It just works.' Jim Allchin details various planned Longhorn features to meet this goal, such as auto-defragmenting in the background, the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously, and the new ad campaign Microsoft is running to get people excited about Windows. Mentions are also made of the competition from Linux, OS X Tiger, and Google."
Just works.... they way they tell you it should. (Score:5, Insightful)
How long will I have to struggle with it to figure out how to turn that off?
Pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
I laughed, I cried... (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny, my Powerbook G4 has been doing this for years. I guess Microsoft will be downplaying that a bit further down...
Much has been made in the computer press recently of the surprising similarities between Longhorn and Apple's upcoming new Macintosh operating system, Tiger. (See Peter Lewis's recent column, Apple's 'Tiger' to Stalk Rivals April 29.) The bottom line is that both will make finding items in our ever-increasing digital stores of information and entertainment much easier. Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page. If you have a really good monitor--and eyesight--you could even read the numbers in that spreadsheet. You also will be able to put files simultaneously in different folders, and find the one you want with much more ease than you can today. Microsoft's research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items. "We're trying to go beyond search into what we call 'visualization and organization,'" said Allchin
Right. I got Panther to do this with a little tweaking, and from what I read, Tiger may be doing something similar. Talk about innovation...
For all the advances that Microsoft and other computer companies have made in recent years, and despite the fact that PCs are central to many of our lives, it's still hard to use them. So it was reassuring to hear the main guy responsible for making their software predict that the situation will improve soon. I hope that he's right when he says that future systems will "just work."
Great. Fantastic. *Applause* But I don't trust it. I've heard this before. Until I see some increased security before they attempt to make their UI as beautiful as Mac OS X, I'm not even going to bother giving them the time of day.
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:5, Insightful)
Rephrasing (Score:4, Insightful)
konqueror has done this for a while... I'm not terribly versed in GUI file managers for X, but I'd presume that other programs do it as well... I guess their new mantra is just a reincarnation of their old mantra "Steal other people's ideas and then charge for it!"
Rather than running just on computers that process 32 bits of data at a time, the new version will run on chips that process 64 bits.
To rephrase: "Windows will finally catch up to the rest of the world and be compatible with emerging technology, a practice that Microsoft is loathe to indulge in (see Internet Explorer)."
"If it's got arithmetic logic on it, then I think our software should be targeting it"
Another rephrasing: "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile." - Jim Allchin, addressing my TI-86.
Software patents... (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, if Google were evil, they'd have patented the 'labels' feature of Gmail, and would sue Microsoft for copying that feature here.
More likely, although Google came out with it first, Microsoft will probably get a silly patent for this instead, in spite of the prior art of ln, Gmail labels, etc.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, as we know "It Just Works" was invented by Apple.
It's not like the phrase returns 150,000 hits on Google or anything. And Linux distros like Ubuntu certainly haven't used that phrase to describe their OS.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
hey, wait a minnit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: stocks (Score:2, Insightful)
It does work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then you are on your own.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Every marketing dept knows that innovation means risk. Risk could mean loss, and at a time that Linux and Mac OS X are on the rise, it's a risk they can't afford to take. So they're going with what's tried and tested.
They have a strangle-hold on the desktop market. They just need to make sure people don't switch to other OSes by offering them just enough.
Interestingly, their motto might as well have been "It's just enough". At least it's original.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
They tend to hire the very best and brightest, right out of the top IT programs in the country, and train them from the beginning of their careers into "the Microsoft Way."
I've seen some of the questions they ask new hires in the interview. They love to throw MENSA-type logic puzzles at candidates to really separate the wheat from the chaff and get top-notch problem solvers on board.
Apple, on the other hand, has a reputation for a long hippie-dippy history (at least during the times it has been under Jobs's watch) of recruiting programmers with education and experience background completely outside the computer sciences, especially people with artistic backgrounds.
I strongly suspect this is the key difference as to why Apple, with a much smaller staff and having much less money, keeps cranking out fantastic ideas (with a few duds in the mix), and spotting the truly great garage innovations worth buying (for example, the decision to hire the SoundJam programmer to build iTunes for them)... while Microsoft seems to be completely incabable of ever bringing anything new to the table, or even recognizing something as worth buying/stealing before it's already a success.
Re:Well I gotta say (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason why I am able to work in the computer field that I do is because of that mentality. The hours, days, and weeks that I spent reading HOWTO's and man pages were all well spent. I didn't have to pay to learn how to configure, maintain and program a computer.
While there are allegorical sources of knowledge for Apple and Microsoft products, I have not been able to learn new technologies from these companies as I have with Open Source.
What I love so much about Linux is that I can dig as deep down into the system as I want and find exactly what I was looking for. With Linux, you never hear "this is a known issue, we are working on it", "this will be fixed in the next release", or "use this workaround". With Linux, you hear "RTFM n00b" because the documentation is already there.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that Microsoft has a long history of adding features to their operating system, and putting all the effort into the feature instead of putting some into the configuration of the feature.
I don't care if the feature is there, or what the default state is, as long as I don't have to go somewhere arcane that I'd never think of without hours of exploring to turn it off... Just like I hated having to figure out that the power settings for my hard drive were in "Display Settings" under screen saver.
Re:spyware (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft [msn.com] did copy [people.warp.es] the Ubuntu logo [ubuntulinux.com] as well, unless Ubuntu did copy ther logo from someone else before...
Well... I guess everyone does copy from someone else somewhere in time.
Re:It just won't work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Defragmenting "just works"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny you should mention ReiserFS. Version 3 implemented efficient block allocation, much like E2fs and others have. It didn't need to be defragmented, either manually or automatically. As long as the filesystem didn't get too full then it worked fairly well. But the new Reiser4 however uses a periodic "repacker", which sounds very much like auto-defragmentation.
From the long document of the Namesys website:
Emphasis mine.
I wonder how much effort is expended allocating blocks in Reiser4. From the document it would be safe to assume the attitude is something like "put it to disk as fast as possible, leave the repacker to optimise things". If a file is only short-lived (temporary) then it's not really worth optimising its allocation and placement.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
SoundJam was not a "me too" MP3 player. It was a better MP3 player than just about anything else that was floating around at the time. For a tiny shareware app, that's relatively impressive.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rephrasing (Score:3, Insightful)
This dumbing down gets annoying. "Oh, we will make the user's experience so much better by assuming what he wants and doing tons of stuff in the background." If I download a file from who knows where, I surely don't want any code processing its contents without my knowledge.
Look what they did with SP2's IE. AFAIK there is a "feature" that tags downloaded files as "untrusted" or simliar. So if you download an
"It just works" doesn't make me comfortable. It rings alarm bells.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, kinda like iTunes does.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
A Bad Slogan for Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple is a hardware company that provides software to their own line of computers and other electronic devices exclusively, Microsoft is a software company that supplies software to everyone.
What does this mean?
Apple controls their hardware line. They don't have to worry about someone buying an off brand powerbook and having their software not work on it.
Microsoft has to support all different kinds of hardware, from ancient legacy systems to bleeding edge stuff. It is extremely unlikely that it will "just work," all the time.
They would have been better off stealing the Linux slogan, "Does it run Linux?" which seems to be applied to any random piece of hardware that comes out that might be capable of running an operating system.
Re: stocks (Score:3, Insightful)
If they decided to release dividends periodically, it would still be a decent buy, because they make so much damn money.
Re:an astute comment from reader of TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Dim-witted: I just don't remember where I put that file. I guess I'll have to look in every folder for it.
Computer Illiterate: When I click File>Save I just click OK when the dialog pops up. I don't bother renaming it or putting it somewhere that is accessible. Now it's really hard to determine where I save that Really Important Document, and if it is Untitled-1.doc or Untitled-72.doc.
Poor Organizer: I just save everything into My Documents. I know where to go to find it, but I have 3,000 files in there to scroll through just to find the one I want.
If corporations would train users how to use and organize their files, this database-filesystem shit would only be a nice extra feature, not a must-have killer app.
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
i'm sorry, but doesn't bolding a parenthetical statement defeat some of its purpose?
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's not the most ignorant thing I've ever heard. Modal dialogs and windows are an important tool.
Re:wtf?? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.sht
For example, I used this to share Sims neighborhoods between user accounts so my girlfriend's characters can interact with mine. works great, but be careful with it.
Anm
wow. progress. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:an astute comment from reader of TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Not every file being looked for was created by the person looking for it. I've found myself frustrated by this many times, and have been left with no option BUT to search every folder.
I do this.... I've gotten so used to having applications configured myself sometimes I use an application that I either forgot to configure, or one that doesn't have an option to configure (so I have to navigate each time to a "standard" place -- don't laugh, lots of these apps still exist, and you don't always get alternative choices...).
If this were a crime, 90 percent of the population would be brought up on charges. It's hard enough to organize stuff you understand with technology you understand.... But try organizing when you're using tools you barely understand with tools noone understands that create files in "standard" places noone knows about!
If corporations would train users how to use and organize their files....
Training?!? What's that?
Seriously, if there weren't a need for retrieval tools, they wouldn't be getting created. On the other hand what I find most fascinating about the original article was Allchin's concession at all about the non-productivity. That "admitted" non-productivity in my opinion is largely contributed to and exacerbated by the amazingly bad paradigm put together by Microsoft for directory structure, organization, and permissions.... "Documents and Settings"????? What the heck it that???? (The one time I'd wished for Microsoft to copy unix with a fairly standard notion of something like "/home/login", but, noooooooo.)
Re:It just won't work (Score:1, Insightful)
"It Just Works", a pretty accurate slogan - (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider:
"You get a just a D in this class"
"You earn just $10 of allowance this week"
"There are just 50mg of sodium in diet coke"
Longhorn - It Just Works!
Does it work well? I'm not saying!
Stupid Longhorn Shit (Score:1, Insightful)
The fuck I won't. When my hard drive starts rattling for no apparent reason and any app that needs to page in some memory slows to a crawl, I'll know for sure a defrag is happening.
If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen.
Unless I don't happen to want it to play fullscreen. At least if it starts in a window there's an obvious "maximize" button to change that. How is it supposed to simplify things to remove all visible controls?
You also will be able to put files simultaneously in different folders, and find the one you want with much more ease than you can today.
Yeah, great. This isn't a symlink because that's what they call an "alias". Is it a cross-linked directory entry? What happens when you delete one of the "copies" in an environment where every legacy user in the world is used to see two real copies if they see the same file in two places?
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.
OK, can someone please explain to me why I'd want this? It'll be too small to read, so unless you put the title up in big bold letters at the top you won'd be able to see anything helpful in text documents. My wife is a professional writer: they don't use things like that when preparing a manuscript for submission. Even then you won't have anything you couldn't have gotten from the filename. You know, that label on the file that's supposed to tell you what's in it? And how will it make things easier to find in a directory with 100 or so files in it without inducing eyestrain?
Windows is only getting started, as far as Allchin is concerned.
Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. Sorry Allchin, but 20 years is a long time to still be "only getting started" even for a defense contractor. Why have you taken so much time and still not gotten it right?
Microsoft Plug And Play (Score:5, Insightful)
With Windows 95, Microsoft created a "standard" called Plug And Play. Of course, the Microsoft version involved the Add Hardware Wizard, which, in the opinion of many Macintosh users then and now, is entirely contrary to the idea of plug and play. (To be fair, the classic Mac OS wasn't always literally plug and play, either, but OS X almost always is.)
I can only wonder what the It Just Works philosophy will give us.
In MS's defense. (Score:4, Insightful)
This looks like it is being taken out of context. Notice they split his sentence into two parts. I don't see MS using this term anywhere else in the article or stumping on the "It just works" slogan.
I am a Linux and Mac fan. I also think LongHorn is playing catch up to apple as far as UI goes. However, this article is a little unfair. Definitely anti-MS propoganda. Which is good
Re:Just works.... they way they tell you it should (Score:3, Insightful)
At first, I was seriously annoyed that it whacked my file structure. Then, I understood what it was doing, and the file structure was irrelevant.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Not even that (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac OS X:
To turn on sharing, open up System Preferences > Sharing > Turn On File Sharing. Done. If anyone connects to the shared computer, they have to either login with the user name and pass, or access it as a Guest. Guest's only have access to each user's Public folder (which also has a dropbox inside).
Windows:
Right-click a folder > Sharing Tab > Share this folder. Now by default anyone can access this folder. To moderate access you have to open up Windows Explorer > Tools Menu > Folder Options > *View* (wtf??) > scroll down and check a box that says something along the lines of: Then you've got to go back and right click the shared folder, go the sharing tab, and configure the new confusing options. The options make you manually type in the name of the users (or groups) that are allowed to have access to the folder. Finally, you're done setting up sharing on Windows.
Macs used by "lone wolves"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft loves to tout "the numbers" because that's really all they have going for them. Quantity does not equate to quality, however. There's something to be said for any company that strives to produce a top-tier product, even when that means not being capable of producing large numbers of it to "dominate the marketplace".
Many of the best musical instruments aren't cranked out by the millions by a manufacturer. Rather, they're painstakingly assembled by hand, in small numbers. If they weren't "niche" products, they wouldn't be worthwhile products at all.
The gaming market, right now, is all about quantity too - so it goes without saying that they're all over the Windows platform. Still, one can argue that many of the best/most entertaining games are only available for game consoles - not for Mac *or* PC. And it's beginning to look like this trend is only going to gain more momentum. (Again, when you're shooting for maximum sales numbers above all else, you start thinking in terms of "Why not write this for one specific hardware configuration we KNOW is in a given console, rather than trying to support all these potential PC software conflicts and gaming peripherals, etc.?")
Meanwhile, game consoles seem to be headed towards using the same processor that's in the Mac, not the PC
I use my PC pretty much only for gaming these days, and my Mac for everything else. If I invest a couple hundred bucks or so in a new generation console (XBox 2 or something), I could probably ditch the Windows PC completely and not really miss it.
Re:They copied the features, why not copy the slog (Score:3, Insightful)
Works with What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Making Windows "Just work" by automating tasks has nothing to do with how Apple has been successful making their Operating System "Just Work".
The reason this phrase is synonimous with Apple is because, since the beginning, when you sat down in front of your Mac and *you* the USER tried to do something, you just did it. Yourself.
That's what "It Just works" means... it's the user coming back and telling their friend,
"Hey I just plugged in my video camera and made a movie in like 5 minutes. I don't really know how I did it, but I did, IT JUST WORKED!"
Apple can accomplish this because of it's control on hardware and OS integration. It works because the software is designed to take care of the basics behind the scenes and let the User take control of the situation.
"It Just Works" does not equal more Wizards that delay and annoy you or "helpful" messages like, "You have unused items on your Desktop, please let me delete them!"
It Just Works means the computer facilitates the process so that the User feels as though they are empowered and able to accomplish a task.
The 'emphasis' is on the wrong word! (Score:2, Insightful)
it depends what you're playing! (Score:2, Insightful)
Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple used this phrase against Microsoft. Nobody things that Windows "Just works."
* Files in multiple folders simultaneously
OMG. They have reinvented hard links and symbolic links!
* Autodefragmentation
When was the last time you defragmented an EXT2 or ReiserFS partition?
Besides didn't we hear that this feature was planned for NT4?
Windows gets features last... (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.
Um, excuse me, but isn't this what KDE has been doing for quite some time now? Why do Windows users have to wait for features I'm already using in Linux?
I don't know whether Linux is just coming of age or if Microsoft is starting to slip behind the times, but it seems like more and more features are showing up in Linux before Windows:
Okay, so I haven't seen a Mac in a while, so the whole file preview thing might not have originated with KDE. But from this, it looks as if Microsoft is starting to lose some momentum.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly what I was thinking... the whole "It just works" idea is why I went from Windows to Linux, and from Linux to Mac. But for Microsoft to expect people to have faith that their shitty software will ever "just work" is sort of ridiculous.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
This is why Microsoft will fail in this strategy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
To make up for this lack of understanding (I doubt MS even realizes it doesn't understand how systems should behave) the company builds scripted interactions (unlovingly known to all of us as those irritating "wizards" that keep you from successfully creating the graph you want in Excel, etc...). In short, MS papers over bad behavior with bad interfaces that obstruct, obfuscate, and harass the poor souls who have to suffer through them. Microsoft has even named this philosophy: recall "Task Based Interfaces."
And may the Lord have mercy if you don't want to perform a task Microsoft hasn't already thought up.
Apple, on the other hand, approaches the problem differently. Rather than asking "how can we make it easy for someone to do XYZ," Apple asks "what should the tool XYZ do," and then if necessary builds an interface that allows people to modify that behavior through understandable, easy-to-find, commands/menus/buttons, etc.**
Apple's strategy, starkly 180 degrees from Microsoft's "task based" strategy, is a human based system. Apple doesn't guess what you're trying to do, but instead makes tools that do what you expect. Thus people, not magical condescending wizards, can apply the tools to whatever variety of tasks may be at hand. So things "just work" because the tools do what we expect from them. Then the computer becomes transparent to the task, rather than the focus of the task itself.
You probably won't encounter a single "wizard" included by Apple in OS X, aside from the intial setup assistant that isn't so much a "wizard" -- there's nothing "guiding" you through the setup screens -- as just a few screens full of fields of information the computer collects to get OS X configured appropriately.
As long as Microsoft doesn't understand that for something to "just work," a tool needs to do what people expect, and that people should be able to directly interact with the tool's interface in a manner that allows even a relatively uninformed person to make the tool do what they want, then Microsoft won't succeed in building highly usable human interfaces.
Since I'm confident that Microsoft hasn't turned a new leaf in this respect, I'm also confident the "it just works" campaign will amount to nothing more than saturation marketing and a lot of grumbling*** about cute animated puppy dogs pissing on our files.
--
* You could probably make a pretty good case for this problem being a fundamental problem in other aspects of Microsoft's design philosophy: bloat, poor security, inconsistency, and generally quirky, hard to predict behavior, could all spring from the same fertile root.
** This is a recursive strategy. It's not enough to make aprogram that does what a person expects, but every sub-piece of that program also needs to also do what a functionally experienced, but non-expert, user interacting with the tool for the first time might think it should do. Each button should be intuitively named. Menu items should be logically organized. The interface should be sufficiently uncluttered that interface elements are readily seen. It's OK for a system to have an unfamiliar way of interacting with the user (for example, drag-and-drop) if that method of interaction is widely applicable across the entire system so that once someone is familiar with the technique they can use it elsewhere. And so on.
*** Here's an amusing, and very telling, anecdote about MS human interfaces: I was once talking to a Microsoft programmer about user interface issues, and brought up Clippy as one of the most glaring examples of Microsoft's human interface failures...but the programmer refused to believe me that most people actual
Re:Unbelievable (Score:1, Insightful)
"On the contrary"? In my language, "complaining" and "whining" are virtually synonymous.
We complain when Linux apps merely copy existing apps, and we complain when Windows apps merely copy existing apps. Looks like one standard for everybody, to me.
Where's this difference you're seeing?
Re:Believable (Score:2, Insightful)