Alex Barnett blog

Stuff

Breaking the Vista Customer Experience

 Pito, you're dead right on this:

"I’ve written in the past that I thought at 60,000 feet, Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X are more or less the same in terms of ease of use. The one huge (and probably crucial) exception to this is the initial user experience. I can only imagine what my 80 year old father in law would do if he saw the screen as it looks ‘from the factory.’"

By "from the factory", Pito is referring to the OEM software crap that's added to machines over the OS - "Vonage this" and "AOL that" plus additional "added value software" that unquestionably degrades the initial out-of-the-box customer experience.

In my personal use experience, the number 1 example of this OEM "fiddling" is the crap that is laid over the default Windows wireless / hardware / software configruation. On three different laptops family members have bought in the last couple of years (XPs at the time), each had these "added value wireless configurators" - software that is meant to help you connect to wireless networks and manage those connections - but in fact does the complete opposite - they hinder the straightforward act of wireless network discovery and connection.

For those three laptops (2 Dells and an HP) my dad and siblings actually found it impossible to get a connection going to their home networks using the additional bundled wireless software that auto-runs on start-up. The wireless network they were connecting to were completely standard set-ups. Support was called and they couldn't help so suggested that the machines were taken back to the shop to figure out the problem. So fixed it. The solution? Each time I simply removed the OEM wireless-related software and restarted. The moment I did that, each machine's wireless connectivity "just worked".

Pathetic, and worse - uneccesary. This kind of crap customer experience is so damaging to the Windows perception. That's really got to annoy all those thousands of PMs, Devs, Test teams that slogged away for the last 5 years to get Vista right, only for it to be messed around with at the final shipping hurdle.

I haven't bought a Apple machine in years so I can't compare its initial customer experience with a new Windows machine, but I'd be happy to place a guessing bet on which is the better in the first 10 to 20 minutes of using the machine. Some might argue "but that's not Microsoft's fault!" - but the customer doesn't care about the why it is - they just experience the is.

Comments

TrackBack said:

# July 29, 2007 5:07 PM

studentrights@hotmail.com said:

It takes about 5-10 minutes to set up a Mac from opening the box through the registration process, depending on wether your a newbie or pro. Apple doesn't install crapware.

# July 29, 2007 7:40 PM

Chuck Cribbs said:

I am setting up a new Mac right now. Wireless and Ethernet discovery is flawless (every time). Not so with Windows, in my experience, and it is much harder than it needs to be. The OEMs need to do a better job of putting themselves in the customers shoes. But they still can't control the experience like Apple does because they don't control both the hardware and the software like Apple does.

# July 30, 2007 8:17 AM

William said:

Apple does have bloatware. It's less obtrusive, but it's there.

There's demo-only software in your Applications folder like iWork. (Doesn't do anything without being launched by the user and easy to uninstall though). Then there are fully functional apps like GarageBand where one doesn't realize they are taking up several gigs of space (with hidden files) and that just deleting the 90 Megabyte application (because, say, you don't compose music) will leave more than 2 Gigabytes of material on your drive doing nothing but bloating up the disk, all just because Apple didn't give a hint about how to properly uninstall this pre-installed package or even that it was there.

More annoying is Quicktime Pro. Want to see something full screen on your new Mac? pay an extra $30 fee to Apple or find a third party tool to work around the problem (greed?).

Of course, I haven't even gotten into bloatware like Dot Mac internet account which is advertised in the Mac OS X installation process as well as in several apps when trying to use internet functionality. Most people have been underwhelmed by Dot Mac's lack of any compelling feature (e.g. only 100Mb of online storage) so its sales success is pretty much only attributable to that moment of opportune confusion during installation and starting new software that might cause some issues.

I love Apple's recent products, and I barely notice the ways bloatware is put on its machines. But even though it's better that the competition, it's not fair to say Apple is squeaky clean when it comes to this practice.

# July 30, 2007 8:33 AM

alexbarnett said:

William - thanks for detail. I think the key point of your comment is:

"I barely notice the ways bloatware is put on its machines."

It is the perception that counts, no?

# July 30, 2007 9:07 AM