Things are simple. Recently we purchased a software called Billings. The software is not made by Apple but has the Apple essence of simplicity .

We were up and running in no time. That too without reading the manual.

Google has been wildly successful largely because of their unrelenting focus on the end user’s
needs. Their pages are always lightweight, their advertising is actually *useful* to their audience rather than intrusive. It seems as though their primary goal is to deliver the best possible user experience and monetization strategies are only employed when they support or at least do not interfere with that goal at all.

Apple, on the other hand makes all sorts of irritating design decisions with OS-X, iTunes and the iPod in order to take their customers prisoner.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Mac and I really really like my iPod.

I just wish Apple would take the next step toward a primary focus on the customer experience. This might yield slightly lower profits in the following quarter. However, in the long run they’d make far more by growing their market share faster.

If more companies adopted Google’s philosophy, we’d all be happier and those companies would probably be quite a bit more profitable.

Moreover, it already lies within the ambit of producers to improve the relevance of products to users by adopting the mindset I laid out in my Geek Marketing 101 piece that I wrote sometime ago in response to another of Doc’s anti-marketing pieces.

http://makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/08/geek-marketing-101_115529822564302037.html

I was quickly impressed by how everything not only worked, it just worked like I expected it to. Talk about user-centered design! These guys had clearly been reading my mind.

Then I entered into a phase of frustration with my PC at work. Two or three times in the next week I caught myself saying “the mac would never do THAT!”

Web-centric software companies are doing the same thing — delivering such high levels of functionality and usability — that they are raising the bar in what we (and our user communities) expect from the software we use at work. No longer will we IT types be able to get away with delivering clunky, low function software.

Tools like http://www.plaxo.com. I haven’t tried it, can’t vouch for its usability or functionality. But the promise of software the synchronizes all my address books all over the place, takes live feeds from directories all over the web to KEEP the contact info up-to-date, and syncs with my mobile over-the-air… and for free? (OK, you have to pay for the mobile sync-ing, but still…)

The software playing field is dramatically shifting again. Are we (internal IT groups) going to be able to find and establish the right partnerships, and change the model for software delivery fast enough to meet the demands of our users?

And are we going to learn to think like our users, to drive our usability practices high enough up the priority stack, to deliver software they love as much as JP loves his Mac?