Oh so many years ago now, Microsoft, Lotus and Word Perfect were in a fight for market share in Office Productivity software. It was the mid ‘90s. Word Perfect was the dominant word processor, and Lotus had their 1-2-3 spreadsheet. There are so many stories from that time, one that sticks out for me as relevant today is the Best of Breed story. While Word Perfect concentrated on its word processor, Microsoft and Lotus were building a suite of applications (remember Ami Pro anyone)?
Microsoft and Lotus took two very different approaches to their software. Lotus applications looked distinctly different on each platform, DOS, Windows, and Unix. Lotus called it Best of Breed. Each application was designed work the best on each platform, taking advantage of platform capabilities like multitasking and memory management. Application design even factored in differences in human interface devices such as monitor sizes and resolutions. All without regard to consistency. Why would a Unix user every work in Windows?
We know how that story ended. Microsoft put a lot of effort making their application experience the same on all platforms, even building a windows-like menu system for their DOS apps. There was wisdom in this approach. As Windows became more popular, DOS users could transition more easily to Windows versions of their applications. It was a big deal, made transitioning to Windows easier and less costly. In the newly emerging world of graphical user interfaces, usability improvements (and Microsoft spent a lot of effort and money in the usability lab during this time) could be leveraged for all versions of the application regardless of platform.
It seems like common sense now. Users are users. Make your application easy to use and people will use it. If the message wasn’t clear by the late 90s, the advent of the World Wide Web, and, three seconds later, the advent of the first impatient Web user, drove it home. But once again, things have changed.
New form factors have entered the mix. Smartphones and tablets – many with a variety of screen sizes as well as different capabilities and limitations. Now, once again, the platforms are dictating application capabilities as well as user experience and design. Apps written for one platform aren’t as polished on other form factors even when they are from the same manufacturer. Many iPhone apps don’t look great or have a less than great user experience on the iPad for example. Bring in Windows Phone 7 where the scrolling is up and down instead of right to left and you have yet another wrinkle.
Microsoft looks like they are, once again, trying to bring some uniformity to this area. From what’s been shown and released about Windows 8 so far, we see that the PC OS, Tablet OS, and Phone OS will all look and work in similar fashions. See this this article from The Next Web. We have yet to see if it’s successful, and if it can really cut down on development per device in the touch interface world of today. For now, best of breed is back, and rules the mobile app development world.
Posted Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 9:09 am by Bob Carver
Tags: Best of Breed, Breed, Mobile
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