 |
 |
 |
|
Trojan Storm
The storm has arrived, and the peerage is weighing in with its reactions. When I first read about Hailstorm, it scared the shit out of me. (As it also did to Joel Spolsky, who gives us a fine tech-level explanation of exactly why.) But at a deeper level — the social level where the Net connects us — I have complete faith in forces more powerful than any monopoly's wet dream. And that's the Net. The Net is ours. Not Microsoft's. Hailstorm is heavy weather, but the Net is geology. Our geology. It's us, not just me (pun intended). Computing isn't personal any more. It's social. Microsoft understands that, but it's not where they come from. Where they come from is the desktop. Always have, always will. It's not for nothing they're called Microsoft. With Hailstorm, Microsoft is doing a beautiful job of being itself. As always, they're draping users in bountiful benefits, whether those users want them or not). That's just what Microsoft does. They can't help it. They come from the desktop, just like Apple comes from art and Nordstrom comes from shoes. And they sound very convincing, because they're busy advocating the user. You can't go wrong there, can you? O yeah. You always go wrong when you characterize competent human beings as weak and helpless — and then tell them your stuff is their only hope. That's exactly what Microsoft does in the very first line of Building the User-centric Experience: Users are definitely not in control of the technology that surrounds them. Asked to adapt to the differences between the way they interact with local programs and sites on the web, asked to cope with doing things completely differently on their cell phone, their PC, and any other device they have, users are generally frustrated and confused. Like moths in a lampshade. How sad. And whose fault is that? If you want to enter a friend’s new phone number into your PC, you use a keyboard and a piece of software like Microsoft Outlook to do it using a particular sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks. But to enter that same information into your Palm Pilot, you need to learn a completely new interface – right down to relearning how to draw the letters of the alphabet! Oh! It's Palm's fault! That OS is so hard to use. Not easy like Outlook, which is so encrusted with options that few users ever figure the damn thing out. (To say the least of it.) The insults continue: This environment, in which users are forced to adapt to technology instead of technology adapting to users, creates significant restrictions on how effective any application or Web site can be, and ultimately hinders the acceptance and adoption of not only the technologies themselves, but also the real-world products and services that might be best offered to a user in the context of the things they do online. The environment we're talking about here is called a market. Yes, it's messy. Yes, it's full of choices that don't agree with each other. But it's the natural habitat for business. It's also networked to the gills. That network is where users live. Not just Windows. Not just .Net, whatever it becomes. The Trojan Storm here isn't Windows or even .Net. It's Internet Explorer. The Net is ours, indeed. But most of us interact with it through a Microsoft browser. That browser is about to get a lot fatter. That's the only way to interpret this: HailStorm services are oriented around people, instead of around a specific device, application, service, or network. They put the user in control of their own data and information, protecting personal information and making user consent the basis for who can access it, what they can do with it, and for how long they have that permission. It's time for us to stop acting like an audience and start acting like a market. For that we need to do three things:
It's important to remember that this is not just about Microsoft's napoleonic corporate personality, which is equally real and beside the point, making it the biggest red herring in business history. It's about building out the Net's infrastructure. .Net doesn't do it. Hailstorm doesn't do it. Java doesn't do it. No "solution" controlled by one vendor will do it. You can't privatize what only works because it's public. Microsoft hasn't learned that lesson yet. Let's help them.
|
