The Digital Life

The Digital Life


UX News: Microsoft Mobile, Tesla Batteries, and Smart Watch Wars

May 07, 2015

Jon: Welcome to episode 102 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hey Jon, how's it going?

Jon: Good, very excited it's sunny out in Boston, which has been a rare thing. So I'm enjoying the sunshine and being solar powered for once, instead of powered internally.

Dirk: Yeah, it's been beautiful weather after the long winter. It's just getting hotter.

Jon: Yeah, that's true. It's going to get up to 90 later in the week. Not really looking forward to that, but that's on it's way. This week on The Digital Life one of our favorite things to do is dig into some of the latest tech topics in user experience and software. Today I've got three news items for us to explore in the areas of mobile, emerging tech, and wearables. I'm just going to dive right in here.

This is a really interesting move. Microsoft last week with their Windows 10 system are now encouraging developers to port their Android and iOS apps to Windows. They're going to make that easy to do via this new tool kit for Windows 10. To me, I like that Microsoft is getting really pragmatic on the fact they're like, "Hey, we don't have any apps for our windows mobile, we need to get some quick. Let's make it say for people to port." I don't know. How does that strike you, Dirk?

Dirk: It's interesting. It's such a tired old harangue, Apple, and Google, and Microsoft all locked on this dance on the mobile side. Microsoft is so clearly losing. I don't know, I think it's well intentioned. They now they need to try and get back in the game. Will it be successful? I don't now, in the short term I can't imagine it having that much impact. Who knows?

Jon: Yeah. Another interesting thing that Microsoft is doing right now is it's making their Windows 10 OS available for screens that are 9" and smaller. To those original equipment managers, the OEMs, they're making the system available for free now. Their new CEO is definitely taking some risks here because he knows, as you said, they're losing the battle for mobile. They've got in their head they've got the desktop, they've got this huge legacy resource and they're really losing on the mobile OS front. These are some interesting pragmatic and un-Microsoft type moves that I guess the new regime is putting out. Yeah, it remains to be seen if they'll have any effect. Is this changing your perception of Microsoft? Is this a new Microsoft to you? What is this, what do you think?

Dirk: From brand perceptive, Microsoft reminds me of McDonald's. It's a dinosaur, it's something that used to be dominant and really controlled the market. The things that made it dominant have become, if not irrelevant, certainly less important; out of fashion to some large degree. People are just really slow to buy the changes. I saw the McDonald's headline today, the new CEO "We will have better products." Hallelujah, that sounds great, but people have identified McDonald's with a certain thing or decades all around the world. Microsoft is in a similar position.

From the standpoint of personal software, personal computing Microsoft has had a very specific role, one, when they were at their best, that was of crushing business dominance, a totalitarian state of forcing people out of business, crushing Netscape, and really becoming almost monopolistic in terms of their control of aspect of the market. Those things led them to have Internet Explorer become so outdated and so out of step with where software technology was going, that now it's discontinued 20 years down the road from when it was essentially the only operating system, or 15 years; 15, 20 years. It's the same old company trying to modernize, trying to change. You can only get so or away from that brand identity that has really defined you. Especially if what you're trying to do is play catch up.