Gil Zilberfeld, an agile practices expert, has posted on 4 warning signs that Agile is declining. I will not re-iterate his points; you should read the article for yourself. The overall theme though is this. The software establishment - including the managers, the consultants, the trainers, the vendors - has embraced Agile, to the extent that, according to Zilberfeld, more than half of software projects at least nominally use Agile methods. The results are disappointing though, because companies have simply absorbed bits of Agile into their existing top-down management culture. Therefore:
At this point, I feel Agile is declining into what TQM [Total Quality Management] was. A brilliant success in the beginning, and now just a history fact. In a few years, months even, the business side will wake up and say: Agile is snake oil. It doesn't deliver on its promise (and it doesn't matter if it's done wrong). The backlash will be grand.
I am reminded of something I learned from one of the excellent QCon conferences in London, which covers Agile in depth. It was not so much a specific speaker or talk, more a common theme running through many presentations. Software projects generally do not fail for technical reasons. They fail because the team - using the word team in its widest sense, to include all project stakeholders from users to executives - fails to communicate effectively. Many Agile techniques, such as the daily meeting which is part of the Scrum methodology, are designed to facilitate communication. I have also heard recommendations such as moving developers into the same office as managers in order to get them talking to each other. Another example, at a micro level, is Pair Programming, where two developers work side by side on the same code. You cannot do this without communicating your intentions, ideas and solutions to the person alongside you.
Kent Beck, one of the pioneers of Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development, highlights the human factor in software development. Take a look, for example, at his essay on Accountability in Software Development:
... while programming I offer accountability as a way of demonstrating my trustworthiness and encouraging my own best behavior. Pair programming; test-first programming; continuous integration; visible daily, weekly, and quarterly cycles; slack; and estimation are some of the way I make public commitments and render account of my activities. Knowing I will be honest and accountable affects how I do my work, just as knowing that I am hiding and concealing negatively affects how I do my work. Taking responsibility for my choices and actions deflects blame. There is no hidden shame if everything I do is above board.
What is important here is not the techniques in themeselves, but the trustworthiness and accountability they facilitate.
Human problems are harder to solve than technical problems, and seen in this light it is not surprising that companies which adopt bits of Agile methodology without changes in corporate and management culture will miss out on most of the benefits.
Another common experience at software development conferences is to talk to developers who enthuse over the insights they have received, but then lament that they cannot be applied in their workplace. The reasons are old and familiar: inflexible management, longstanding broken processes that nobody seems able to fix, little kingdoms which protect their borders at the expense of the effectiveness of the whole corporation, and so on.
A few thoughts in conclusion. First, if Agile projects are failing, that does not necessarily imply that something is wrong with Agile methodology. It all depends on how it is done and whether the people involved are embracing or resisting the change and communication that goes along with it. Second, irrespective of the methodology, effective communication is key to the success of a project; and if it is not possible to change the methodology or even the tools and technology, working on team communication may still yield amazing results.
It is a little early for a review of the year, but not too early to state that 2011 has brought profound changes to the software development world. Although I am thinking mainly of the client, I would also argue that client and server are so intertwined that both are affected. As an example, I have heard developers moving away from SOAP web services not because of any conviction that REST is a better approach, but because the move away from Windows and towards HTML clients makes SOAP web services more difficult to consume.
So what's changed? Simply put, three platforms which once seemed strategic are now in obvious decline. Getting the nuance right for these platforms is tricky. Lots of software still runs and is still widely used long after it has ceased to be strategic for the company which supports it. All the platforms mentioned negatively below are still in active development; they are not going away and will still be running ten years and more from today. They come with health warnings though: depending on these platforms means that your software will gradually become more difficult for users to run and will be left behind by new technologies.
In the run up to the launch of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 I spoke to a number of Microsoft platform developers. The consensus then was that Silverlight was very important and possibly the future of Microsoft's client. The view was supported by the company's energetic development efforts for Silverlight. It also made a lot of sense: a lightweight, secure, cloud-centric client that escaped the GUI limitations of Win32, worked in the browser or as a desktop application, and as a bonus run on Mac as well as Windows. Silverlight, as I noted in several articles, is client-side .NET done right.
This is not the place to write a long screed about why Silverlight failed, but rather to note that at the end of 2010 it became obvious that Microsoft was changing direction. At the Professional Developers Conference, October 28-29 2010, it was hardly mentioned, and the company focused instead on HTML and Internet Explorer 9. The full extent of its new strategy was not shown until this year, at the BUILD conference in September.
It is not only external developers that were surprised by what seemed a sudden change of direction. The same seems to be true of many within Microsoft itself. Nor am I sure exactly when someone decided that Silverlight was no longer strategic, though there are clues in the Silverlight release schedule. When Silverlight 4 was unveiled in November 2009 it was still ascendant. Silverlight 5, due out shortly, suggests that it was still considered important in early 2010. Visual Studio LightSwitch released this year was likely planned in part as a way of boosting Silverlight, since it builds Silverlight applications. But nobody is talking about Silverlight 6.
Silverlight is still the development platform for Windows Phone 7, but many observers, myself included, believe this will give way to a variant of the new Windows Runtime (see below) in a future version.
This has been a costly experiment for Microsoft. If the company had done the Windows Runtime, rather than Silverlight, back in 2007, imagine how much stronger would be its position now. That said, it is not all wasted. XAML, the presentation language in Silverlight and in Windows Presentation Foundation, continues in the Windows Runtime, and so does the essence of the cloud-centric, client-secure development model.
Back in 2007 Silverlight seemed to be in part a competitive response to the increasing popularity of Adobe Flash. This month though, Adobe went though wrenching changes of its own, announcing the end of Flash on mobile browsers and a fundamental shift in business strategy away from enterprise development and towards content creation and distribution.
There are plenty of parallels with the Microsoft case. One is that the changes also came as a surprise to many within the company, who just a few weeks before, at the MAX conference in Los Angeles, were talking confidently about the future of Flash and of Flex, the application-centric SDK for Flash. Here is Doug Winnie, a casualty of the inevitable layoffs:
The product managers, evangelists, community managers, and developer relations team members found out the news and the way it was communicated at almost the same exact time you did. They are wrestling with the news and your reaction in real time--so please be supportive of them as they dig through everything.
While on the 3rd day of my vacation in Mexico, I got the call with the explanation that Adobe is doing a major refocus and as part of that, many of us "enterprise" types are no longer required. "Überflussig" I guess is the correct German word for the situation. Keep in mind that I now speak as an individual, not as an Adobe employee. I missed most of the official story due to the timing of my vacation but caught up with a few news outlets to get the rationale.
But isn't Flash still going strong on desktop browsers, and the Flex SDK heading for great new things as an open source project at the Apache Foundation? Well, maybe. Adobe is not betting on that though; it is betting on design tools for content, HTML5, and packaging and distributing publications and apps. Its Flash technology is still critical to how that is done under the covers, but Flash itself will be invisible.
Adobe also says that its LiveCycle middleware will continue to evolve in two specific niches:
We will continue to sell and support our LiveCycle products in the government and financial services markets, two areas where the LiveCycle value proposition remains especially strong.
Again, maybe. This sounds more like Adobe keeping faith with some important customers, than a strong future for LiveCycle.
Microsoft announced another profound change in direction at its BUILD conference in September. Although related to the decline of Silverlight, this one deserves its own heading. What we saw was that the Win32 platform on which Microsoft has built its prosperity for the last twenty-one years or so (Windows 3.0 came out in 1990) is now being shunted aside. "Shunted aside" is the right term because it is still there in the forthcoming Windows 8, but it is side by side with the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) and a touch-friendly user interface called Metro. The company's goal is to create a platform that will succeed against Apple's iOS. It runs on ARM as well as Intel x86 and has its own Windows Marketplace, similar in concept to Apple's App Store.
Leaving aside the merits of WinRT, the big news here is that Microsoft is finally moving away from the Windows desktop on which most of us have done our work day to day for the last two decades. The reasons are obvious: mainly the rise of iOS and the iPad, but also the success of the Mac among developers and at the premium end of the laptop market. Windows was already in decline.
Your Win32 applications will work forever, but Microsoft's energy is now going elsewhere.
What about the .NET Framework on the client? It is still there, and thanks to the excellence of the C# language I expect it will be the most popular approach for coding for Metro. Parts of the Framework will no longer work in Metro though, and it may even be that HTML5 and JavaScript, which is equally well supported, will gradually supplant it. Nor do I take the success of Windows 8 for granted; Microsoft may find the tablet market already largely absorbed by iOS and Android.
That is speculation; but the long-term decline of Win32 is not.
If these platforms are in decline, what the ones that are rising fast? That is simple to answer. Apple iOS, Google Android, and HTML5 in general. Are these good for the next two decades as in Win32, or will be on the deprecated list in a few years? That is hard to say; if I had to rate them in order of likely longevity I would guess this:
1. HTML, JavaScript and CSS
2. Apple iOS
3. Google Android
Predictions though are a dangerous game, and I would be interested in other opinions.
I attended Microsoft TechEd USA last month, where the news highlight was a bunch of new features in Visual Studio. Although Microsoft is not revealing what is coming for Windows 8 development, it has shown a bunch of new features ranging from code clone detection, which aims to find code that was copied and pasted rather than being properly refactored, to new IntelliTrace agents that are designed to find bugs after deployment, rather than just in code you are developing.
They are decent features, and it seems that the new Visual Studio will further extend what is already an impressive range of capabilities. I have spent a lot of time researching Visual Studio 2010, the current version, and considering the scope of the tool, from mobile devices to multi-tier enterprise applications, I hold it in high regard.
Talk to developers about what they want to see in Visual Studio though, and you can bet that neither code clone detection nor IntelliTrace agents will be on their list. They would rather Microsoft fixed annoyances rather than adding features which they might not ever use. Performance is always high on the list: not doing new things, so much as doing the same things faster. Quick access to documentation is another. If you are like me, you often end up searching Google rather than pressing F1, since somehow Google can search the entire internet faster than Visual Studio can summon its own documentation.
Why is Windows Vista considered a flop, whereas Windows 7 has flown off the shelves? I doubt it is to do with thumbnails in the taskbar, or even the Libraries feature, presenting multiple folders as one, a neat feature but often not well understood.
My guess is that better performance is the main reason, followed by hundreds of small usability improvements which Microsoft made. Windows 7 is not perfect, but it generally runs better than its predecessor.
There is always pressure to add features. If you are a software giant like Microsoft, there are marketing reasons; you need those bullet points to win upgrades, or think you do. If you are a corporate developer, there is constant pressure to meet new requirements.
The problem: it is too easy to lose sight of what users often care about more, which is the performance and usability of the applications and features they already use most often.
Somehow, at planning meetings it is hard to justify spending time on improving features that already exist, rather than creating new ones, yet for improving the productivity and even the happiness of users it is often the right thing to do.
I was interested to read Martin Fowler's piece on Cross Platform Mobile. Fowler is Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, which does software development and IT consultancy:
I think cross-platform mobile toolkits are a dead-end. It's just too hard for them to really mimic the native experience. If it's worth building a native app, it's worth building it properly, including an individual experience design for that platform.
I do not altogether agree, though he makes a good case and I accept that there are significant obstacles to success. I recommend his piece; all the issues he mentions are real and considerable.
On the other hand, I see it more in terms of acceptable compromises than a binary choice. An Aston Martin is better than a Ford, but a Ford will get me to work and costs less.
The question then becomes: how much compromise do you have to accept if you build a cross-platform mobile app?
Another issue: Fowler says web apps are a capable alternative route, but he adds:
When you do the web app, don't try to make it look and feel like a native app - make it look like a mobile web app
It sounds like good advice; but is there a UI standard for mobile web apps? I am also not sure what this advice means if you wrap a web app as a mobile app using a tool like PhoneGap. Even if you do not want to do this, it may be necessary in order to get access to more native features of the device. Should such an app aim to look more like a web app, or a native app, or is the whole idea a mistake?
Another tricky problem is that with multiple form factors, it is not clear when to apply mobile standards and when to apply desktop and laptop standards. An Apple iPad is a mobile device, but its screen resolution is 1024x768, which is pretty much a full size screen.
There is also a cost involved in not doing cross-platform development. If you only need to support, say, Apple iOS, then fine, get stuck into Xcode 4 and Objective C in the Apple-approved manner. If you need to support more than one platform though, the case is more difficult. Creating an "individual experience design" for each platform means that you have two code bases to maintain, and ensuring parity of features and fixing bugs in both become issues. Multiply the platforms, and it gets worse.
Adobe's Creative Suite is an interesting case. It works on both Mac and Windows, but the UI is more tilted towards consistency between the two versions, rather than looking native to each platform. Dreamweaver CS5.5, for example, looks nothing like a standard Windows application, with its buttons in the top frame of the main window.
However, I would rather have that, than what Microsoft has done with Office on Mac and Windows. The UI is different, the release cycle is different, the features are different, and in general I find it a better experience on Windows than on the Mac, whereas I am equally happy with Creative Suite on either platform.
My guess is that Adobe, with its own internal cross-platform tools, succeeds in sharing more code between the two than Microsoft manages, which is why it is able to deliver synchronised releases. It has tilted the balance towards consistency across platforms, rather than looking native, and that is a valid compromise.
That said, I have been conducting my own experiments with cross-platform toolkits and it is not going all that well. Each toolkit has involved compromises, even with a simple app, and performance has been an issue.
I can also see that the way navigation between difference screens in your app generally works is different on iOS than on Android. Which do you choose?
Cross-platform toolkits may not be desirable then; but they may be inevitable (like death and taxes) unless you have huge resources or are willing to lock-in to a single platform.
I also believe that performance issues will reduce as devices get more powerful, and that web technologies which are common between all the main mobile platforms form a runtime that goes a long way towards solving cross-platform issues.
Last week I attended QCon London, a conference focused on enterprise development and which spans multiple technologies, including Java, .NET, open source, database, mobile, and general development methodologies.
It is among my favourite conferences thanks to its vendor neutrality and the high quality of the speakers and attendees it attracts. Nevertheless, only a tiny fraction of developers make it to QCon. Vendor events like Microsoft TechEd or Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne are bigger, and great for keeping up with what that vendor is up to, but tend to be less though-provoking as the content is steered by what one company wants to promote. It still seems to be only a small minority of developers that make it to such events.
There are lots of reasons for staying away: they are too expensive, or your company will not make the time available, or you are not convinced that there is enough signal above the noise, or you are too busy simply keeping up with the work you have already. Are conferences an unnecessary and costly distraction?
My view is the opposite. Of course I am a journalist and it is my job to track what is new; but I do some development as well, and feel that there is a real risk of falling into a safe pattern of work that makes us blind to new ideas that can quickly repay in productivity or quality the time spent in learning about them.
It is also remarkable how a good event can recover enthusiasm for the craft of writing software, something easily lost in the humdrum world of requirements and deadlines and sometimes dysfunctional corporate structures.
As for QCon, there were several things I came away with - though bear in mind that there were six tracks, so one person could only attend one sixth of what was on offer, keynotes aside.
I spent some time on the mobile track. A session by Fraser Spiers on the Apple iPad in education was irritatingly Apple-centric, but also stimulating in showing how a new model of computing can bring about profound and beneficial changes. I think we will see a lot of iPads in business computing too.
Jerome Dochez spoke on the future of Java EE, not the most exciting session but helpful to see how Java is embracing the cloud computing model.
Google's Patrick Copeland spoke on innovation at Google, with the underlying question being how to create a culture that is friendly rather than hostile to innovators and their ideas.
At the .NET State of the Art track I learned about creating RESTful services, both with the open source OpenRasta and with the official WCF Web APIs; I had not been paying attention to this area and it was an example of how attending a conference can highlight existing and important developments that you might otherwise miss. Of course being QCon the speakers were OpenRasta's author Sebastien Lambla and on WCF Microsoft's Glenn Block; exactly the people you would want to hear on these subjects.
On the last day at QCon I got best value from the NoSQL track. A simple example in a talk on graph databases and Neo4j, where the database needed to model social connections and answer questions like "Who are this persons friends, and the friends of his friends", convinced me that SQL relational databases are not the answer to every kind of data storage problem. Note that NoSQL stands for "Not only SQL" rather than "Never SQL"; you should choose the right data store for what you are storing.
The Guardian's Matt Wall described how the Guardian web site is migrating from Oracle to mongoDB, giving the rationale and describing the benefits. I had never looked at mongoDB before and it was a fascinating talk.
At a high level, QCon has its roots in Agile development methodology; and if you study this you find that much of it boils down to fostering communication between all of a project's stakeholders (not just developers). If you came away with one good idea for improving communication in your own organisation, the whole event may well have been worthwhile.
It does not have to be QCon. My point is that going out, talking to your peers, and getting this kind of input is enormously worthwhile, even in busy or economically testing times.
But what about Microsoft? The company did its best with Windows Phone 7 in CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote, though it seems off to a slow start despite positive reviews. There were also some Windows tablets shown, but these were mostly high-end devices from the Tablet 1 era - full Windows, stylus, expensive, short battery life - devices like the Asus ASUS Eee Slate EP121. These may succeed within the same niche the Windows tablet has always occupied, but they are not a competitor to Apple's iPad, which seems to define the Tablet 2 era: small and lightweight, UI designed for touch, long battery life, apps installed from an app store. Asus also announced tablets in that category. Microsoft gave indications at its keynote that Windows 8, coming maybe in 2012, will be its Tablet 2 OS. That is a long wait; and who knows whether it will be competitive with wherever iOS and Android have got to by then?
This is not just about tablets. At CES, NVIDIA was talking up its Tegra 2 System on a Chip, which powered some of the smartphones and tablets on show at CES. I've been impressed by Tegra 2, though no doubt competitors like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments will have interesting competing packages. A point of interest though is that NVIDIA envisages mobile devices taking over from the PC as the client device for most of us, both on the move and at the desktop. You do not have to give up your keyboard, mouse and large display when at your desk. Tegra 2 supports high-res HDMI graphical output. Just dock your mobile and carry on working.
That is an image that should worry Microsoft. Even desktop computing is not safe from the growth in mobile. But how is it that long-term partners like NVIDIA and Asus are moving away from Microsoft for their mobile OS? It is hard to say who is abandoning whom. NVIDIA told me that one of its problems was that Windows Phone 7 launched with hardware tightly specified to run Qualcomm SnapDragon, while Intel VP Tom Kilroy told CNET that:
... we tried to get [Microsoft] to do a tablet OS (operating system) for a long time. Us, and others like Dell.
What could Microsoft have done? Well, with Windows Phone 7 it came up with a new mobile OS based on Windows CE, including a touch-friendly UI and an app store platform. It could have adapted that for this new generation of tablets.
I have no doubt that this was debated within Microsoft. However, despite those partner requests, the evidence is that conservative voices saying that full Windows must run everywhere won the argument. That is plausible, given that Windows and Office generate the bulk of Microsoft's profits.
While this is plausible, from outside it seems bewildering. How could it be better for Micrsoft that their partners use Android rather than an OS similar to that used in Windows Phone 7? Further, the introduction of tablets running the same OS would have given the application market for the platform a much-needed boost. All the pieces are in place: Silverlight and XNA for secure and isolated application deployment, the Zune marketplace, Visual Studio tools.
There is one angle on this that could benefit Microsoft. The market for Android tablets is not really proven, and it is possible that many of them may fail. In this scenario, manufacturers may be glad to come back to Microsoft for their 2012 line-up.
Still, while I am a bit of a tablet sceptic, I expect a bright future for Android smarthpones and look forward to the powerful Tegra 2 devices coming from the likes of LG and Motorola. Taken alongside the strong trend towards cloud computing, NVIDIA's vision of the future is a reasonable one. I don't mean that we will all be ditching our laptops next time we buy a mobile phone; but that mobile devices will gradually take on more of what we currently do on full PCs.
If that is the case, Microsoft has a serious problem, the impact of which will be felt in business computing as well as by consumers. Fumbling tablet computing, alongside its well-known failings in smartphones, could prove to be Microsoft's biggest mistake yet.
Yesterday I attended Cloudstock, a pre-conference event put on by Salesforce.com as part of its Dreamforce event in San Francisco.
One of the speakers was Ryan Dahl, the author of node.js. He is smart and opinionated and gave a though-provoking introduction to his project. He has a couple of core arguments. The first is that I/O is slow, and therefore all I/O calls should be non-blocking.
The point here is that access to the disk or the network is hundreds of times slower than access to memory. A few milliseconds may not matter much in a single-user desktop application, but if you are coding a server with many concurrent users it becomes important.
You see this problem magnified many times in web pages that allow calls to remote servers to block the loading of a page. Web developers have learned to use callbacks for things like database queries that can take a while to return. Clients like Flash and Silverlight have no other mechanism for web service calls; doing these via callbacks is built in.
Dahl's second point is that threading does not scale well. He showed a slide comparing the performance of Apache to Nginx as the number of concurrent connections increases. It showed Apache's memory usage growing while that of Nginx hardly changed. Dahl said that Apache uses a separate thread for each connection, but Nginx uses an event model, which is why it performs better under heavy load.
Dahl says threads consume too many resources and complicate coding because you have to worry about synchronisation. He adds that Nginx will "probably take the place of Apache" because of its better performance.
Put these two things together and you get Node.js, which is described on its home page as Evented I/O for V8 Javascript, the high-performance Javascript engine in the Google Chrome browser.
Node.js is a binding for V8 that runs on Mac, Linux, Solaris, or with a bit of effort Windows. You would typically use it for real-time server applications that need to support many concurrent users. Dahl actually coded a chat server during the session, though our attempts to connect were defeated by the firewall.
In an aside, Dahl calls HTTP "the worst protocol on earth". He adds that we are now stuck with HTTP/1.1 for ever. Node.js uses Transfer-Encoding chunked to overcome some of its limitations.
Another of his points is that we are too much tied to web servers. "There's all these weird concepts in web stacks, why not just speak HTTP to things?"
Node.js has great performance, but it is low-level and further wrappers and libaries are appearing to make it more productive to use. What might it become in future? After the talk had ended, Dahl took some further questions and admitted that he would love to see it become the next PHP.
A great session; and whether or not you agree with all Dahl's remarks they are a welcome reminder that despite all the effort that has gone into the computing platforms we use constantly, there are things that could be done much better.
Node.js is in effect public domain software, says Dahl. It is not fully done yet, but in 6 months or so the API will be stable. Well worth a look. So, for that matter, is Nginx.
I'm just back from Adobe's partner conference in Amsterdam, where George Neill, Lead Experience Architect at Adobe Consulting, shows us this great slide depicting a woman processing mortgage applications. She has a PC on her desk which is running her organisation's app for managing mortgage applications. However, around here desk are multiple signs of usability failure. On her left, a paper calendar with names and phone numbers handwritten onto deadline days. On her right, an old-fashioned paper roll calculator. In front of her, a pile of paper forms colour coded with post-it notes. The app, Neill notes, should be handling all these tasks, but one glance at the user's working process is sufficient to expose its poor design.
All good stuff. The next thing we see is a nice application built with an Adobe Flex front-end and an Adobe LiveCycle back-end, with the not-so-subtle implication that these user-experience (UX) focused tools will help us create applications that fix this kind of design failure. There's also talk here at Adobe's partner conference of a new era in software built on customer experience, and how consumer technology from iPhone to Facebook and Twitter is raising expectations when it comes to business applications. There are even a few digs at developers, the people who, it is alleged, hate it when requirements change and who develop software geared towards the IT system which which it integrates, rather than towards users.
There is truth in all of this, but I'm cautious. It is easy to find a poor application and poke fun at it, but the idea of observing users and creating applications that improve their productivity is not a new one, and it is not necessary to use Adobe's stuff in order to do good software design. There are even times when it gets in the way. I recall spending time looking for a campsite on the web, for a holiday, and how it was in general the simple HTML sites rather than the "rich" Flash-driven ones that were easier to navigate. Admittedly the average campsite does not create web applications to Enterprise standard, but the underlying point is that there is a case for simple as well as a case for rich. Never forget "skip the intro".
The key question here: how do we define excellence in user experience? Let me state the obvious for the moment.
Applications that have functional deficiencies will not be rescued by any amount of eye candy or beautiful state transitions; and if the user is surrounded by post-it notes and antique calculators I'd suggest that this is not primarily a UX issue, unless we strip all meaning from the term and use it for every aspect of software design, features and performance.
Second, software can deliver a good UX without necessarily having gorgeous graphics and multimedia. As a business software user, I value applications that let me accomplish tasks quickly and easily. Question: think of a web application that changed the world, partly thanks to superb UX? Answer: Google search. Question: how much PhotoShop and Flash was used in designing the fantastic Google home page?
The case for user-centric software design is irrefutable; but we need rigour when it comes to working out what that means and how to achieve it. I like this comment which I found in an 2004 paper by Larry Constantine:
User-centered design is a good idea in need of improvement. The needed improvement is found in practices that put uses rather than users at the center of design and in changing the prime objective from enhancing user experience to enhancing user performance.
UP rather than UX resonates with me. It also reminds me of Kathy Sierra's mantra: creating passionate users. If the current rush towards UX puts the focus there, I am all in favour. If it means newly empowered designers imposing some sort of visual or multimedia experience on us whether we like it or not, count me out.
The iPad has just launched in the UK, queues are long, stock is short, and it is yet another successful new product from Apple. The iPad has frustrations, like no Adobe Flash support for web browsing, no Java, no printing, and the general sense that you do things the Apple way or not at all. Still, users love it and are willing to pay for it, and in the end that is what matters.
Does this shiny gadget have any relevance to the more humdrum world of business IT? I think it does, especially when taken together with other factors. Here's a remark from Apple CEO Steve Jobs from an informal email conversation with Ryan Tate:
The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
Yes, it's a Bob Dylan reference; read the entire thread to see why. Jobs is marketing his company's stuff, of course, but a few days later the stock market put some solid evidence behind his claim. Apple's market capitalisation surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Microsoft remains more profitable; but the figures reflect the market's judgment that Apple has better prospects for growth.
Another sign of change comes from one of Microsoft's most important partners, HP. At the end of April it acquired Palm, and with it the WebOS operating system for mobile devices. Whether HP can make a success of WebOS is uncertain; it will not be easy going up against Apple and Google Android. What is more significant is the implication that HP has finally lost faith in Microsoft's ability to get it right in mobile.
Despite some positive buzz around Windows Phone 7, Microsoft did not help its case when it announced a major reshuffle in its Entertainment and Devices division on May 25th. This follows the bewildering launch of the Kin phone - bewildering because it seems right out on its own in terms of strategy - complete with typical Microsoft flaws according to this thoughtful review:
But the obtuseness of this user experience doesn't stop with the Spot -- it permeates the entire interface as though decisions about how things should work were made almost arbitrarily, without anyone stopping to test them in the real world. The Twitter implementation is a great example of that. You can add your Twitter account to the phone and see updates from people you follow, and you can update your status from the top of the Loop... but that's all you can do. You can't retweet something, you can't send a direct message, you can't go to single person's feed to see all their updates, and you can't even open a link in a Twitter message from the Loop!
Windows Phone 7 will have to be much, much better if Microsoft is to claw back any ground in mobile.
I digress. All that matters is that the world is changing, and looking less Microsoft-shaped with each passing day.
In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the excellent work which I see coming out of some parts of Microsoft - Visual Studio 2010, for example - or to ignore the continuing dominance of the company in many areas of business IT. Many companies still standardise on Windows, and Microsoft Office remains the only productivity suite I come across in work.
All true, but the two great IT trends of today are not centred on Windows and Office. One is mobile, the other is cloud computing; and of course there is synergy between them. Apple's iPad is a further advance for mobile, and will drive increasing mobile data usage and increasing demand both for iPad/iPhone applications and for web applications that work well on those devices.
I'm at Microsoft's MIX conference in Las Vegas, where the big news has been the unveiling of the Windows Phone 7 development platform, and the platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 with extensive HTML 5 support.
There is more to say about both topics; but one thing I want to highlight is that IE9 will not work on Windows XP, the venerable release that will not die.
It is not only that XP remains in use on existing PCs; there are also new machines on sale with this old version of Windows. I've just purchased a netbook, and when making my selection I noticed that many of them still come with XP, usually the Home edition. Some companies still specify XP when buying new PCs, to avoid the compatibility hassles that come with a move to Vista or Windows 7. There's also doubt over the benefits of upgrading. A friend said to me recently, "I really like XP, it does everything I need. What is the point of moving?"
Here's what IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch told me:
Building a modern browser requires a modern operating system. There are facilities in Windows Vista and Windows 7 around security, for example the integrity level work that gave us protected mode, there are performance improvements that enable a variety of things in the browser, there is graphics infrastructure to take advantage of the GPU, that doesn’t exist in previous operating systems.
A measure of scepticism about such comments is reasonable. Microsoft wants users to buy its latest stuff; there's no surprise there.
Nevertheless, Hachamovitch is right. Windows 7 is more secure and more powerful. Personally I find it easier to use as well, partly thanks to Microsoft's design work on the user interface, and partly because desktop composition in Windows Aero enables richer preview of minimised applications and other good things.
Microsoft is also making a statement with IE9, to the effect that XP users can no longer expect to be included in major product releases. Office 2010 does support Windows XP; but you can bet that the next one will not.
The long life of XP is a side-effect of one specific thing, which is the failure (relatively speaking) of Windows Vista. I used Vista from its first release and regard it as better than its reputation suggests; but nevertheless, it was greedy for hardware resources, prone to annoying slow-downs, and less polished overall that it should have been.
There is also a real issue with application compatibility, introduced with Windows Vista, mainly thanks to User Account Control. This feature protects access to system locations such as the Windows and Progam Files folders, and parts of the Windows Registry, causing problems for some applications that expect full access.
These factors extended the life of Windows XP, resulting in the situation we have today: an operating system coming up to nine years old still in widespread use.
Very often the continuing use of XP is not something we can control. Rather, it is something we have to live with. Nevertheless, it is becoming a liability. Windows 7 improves on XP in every way that I can think of; and we even have XP Mode and Med-V to assist with migration, by running obstinate apps in virtual instances of XP.
Windows XP is something we have to live with, but no longer something to recommend.
Postscript: arriving at the gate for my flight from Las Vegas, I could not resist snapping what seemed the perfect illustration: Windows XP with a sad little error message.
