Simplicity
December 21, 2005
I’ve been hearing a lot about simplicity as the new driving goal of technology design. Via the MeansBusiness newsletter Ideas in the News, we get these thoughts on simplicity from Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International.
“More is going to happen over the next ten years than it did in the past ten. By 2015, the world will again experience the kind of dramatic shift that the internet brought, which is a pretty exciting notion. A lot of this change is going to happen through software…Workers and organisations are already nearing the point of so-called information overload, where the sheer volume of data and the complexity of the applications necessary to work with it threaten to overwhelm the powers of human cognition. These distractions have a demonstrable effect on the productivity and health of workers. Along with the proliferation of channels and features that IT offers, we are looking to offer simplification and insight with our products. That means we are trying to address things like prioritisation, context, attention management, and also to bring in better and smarter ways to visualise and control volumes of complex data.”
I have some better suggestions for Microsoft to accomplish first, beginning with a secure operating system, more stable software, and core applications that aren’t bloated with thousands of features most readers never even learn about, let alone use. Any one of these things would dramatically simplify the experience of millions of users around the world. And then Microsoft executives wouldn’t have to bloviate about information overload—a topic that has been under discussion for 20 years and this guy presents as if it is brand new.
Posted by Bill Trippe at December 21, 2005 10:55 AM
