Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

Don’t be original, just be good

As another way of making the arguments I made in Good beats innovative nearly every time, here’s design legend Paul Rand.

At about the 3:00 mark he says ‘don’t try to be original, just try to be good’

It’s also a fantastic introduction to visual design thinking: better than many textbooks I’ve seen.

Good beats innovative nearly every time

My first article for BusinessWeek is up now:

Good beats innovative nearly every time

Microsoft and Creative Destruction

A recent NYT article by former Microsoft VP Dick Brass has caused quite the stir, but for the wrong reasons.  Every follow up article I’ve read, including one from Microsoft, gets much of it wrong some key things wrong.

The premise: The core point of the Brass article is how the introduction of middle management and bureaucracy has killed innovation at Microsoft.

My counterargument:  Microsoft has always been a conservative, platforms company. Visionary design and creative leaders think in terms of great products, which Microsoft has never been good at. Brass assumes the challenges that hampered Tablet PC were new and local, but they have always been there. Microsoft’s best, and most creative, work has come when a competitor forced one of the few Renaissance-VPs (VPs who were not over-promoted engineers but actually had a diversity of management skills) to take product design seriously.

My credentials: I worked at MSFT 1994 to 2003. I was on the IE 1.0 to IE 5.0 team among others (Windows, MSN, and MSTE/Best Practices, where I worked with many groups across the company). I wrote a bestselling book about Innovation and I’ve spoken and consulted with various groups at the company dozens of times since I left in 2003.

My take:

  1. The primary problem at Microsoft regarding good design &  innovation is the diffusion of creative authority. The problem is not the numbers of people at the company, or the layers of management, as many gripe about.  Layers don’t help, but it’s not the problem. The real issue is the inability to grant creative authority to the few people worthy of it. Microsoft has always been a place that gives way too many people a say in matters of design, vision and user experience, and it shows in the pervasive mediocrity of the majority of its products. Films need directors. Orchestras need conductors. But if you divide things into 30 pieces and ask 30 people to play creative visionary, mediocrity ensues. The better products at Microsoft are the ones where VPs modify the distribution of authority to create clear creative authority.
  2. Few VPs are qualified to be creative leaders, at Microsoft or elsewhere. And there is no creative lead role at Microsoft. There never has been. This is not new, it has always been true (at least since 1994 when I started). This is why when brilliant, genius type software designers come to the company, they are baffled by how little creative power they can earn, so they retreat to research or future thinking groups that have no skin in the game (e.g. Bill Buxton, Steve Capps, Ray Ozzie, Jim Gray (RIP), etc.). Microsoft is simply a hard place for to accumulate wide authority over design, which is required to make coherent visions, user experiences and innovations come true. Worse, it’s rare for leaders to acknowledge death by too many cooks since those who have never worked elsewhere, and have no conception of creative process, can’t imagine  any other way. The culture has always been a heavily consensus/collaboration driven place for managers, which waters down ideas, and shifts what goes out the door heavily towards conservation.
  3. Management at Microsoft is fat with inbred managers who are not worthy of their title, but this has always been true. If you are hired to manage version 5 of something, you inherit a host of decisions made with skills you do not have, yet get credit for anyway. If the team you inherit does good work, and you happen to be the manager, you receive credit, regardless of how little you did. Entire unprofitable, failed divisions, funded by the rest of the company, promote people out of corporate obligation, creating the existence of middle managers who have never actually successfully managed anything in the marketplace. For the 90s, this was MSN and Consumer products, which were perennial failures. The quality pool of people who managed in those divisions was below average and as the company aged more of these groups were born. Microsoft, like all companies, has suffered from the Peter principle, or worse, perhaps the Paul Principle (people who are lousy at even simple management skills but inherit mediocre projects they don’t understand, and simply manage not to get fired via their team’s noble but unheralded efforts, which hide their shortcomings). As a result, there are line level managers at Microsoft who are more competent than some middle or senior managers. But this has always been true, given the diversity of the company. It’s worse now because of the size.
  4. Real layoffs would be a blessing. In 1999 when I left the Internet Explorer team (before the ill-fated IE 6.0 release), I looked around the company for other teams to work on. I couldn’t believe how many lost, misguided, sad, self-destructive teams I saw. This was in 1999! The company has more than tripled in size since then. Mini-Microsoft is so clearly on the mark about his core ambitions.  I don’t wish unemployment on anyone, but I’d say a) the ratio of managers to programmers is insanely out of whack b) The number of projects and divisions that have never made profit and are market laggards is obscene. If the company were split apart, few groups are competent enough to survive a year. This defeats the “strategic value” these properties supposedly have, as dumping of buckets of money earned by Office and Windows profits into their bonfires of incompetence does not a strategy make.  You need basic leadership competence, which all too many groups at Microsoft don’t have (and many never did).
  5. Microsoft’s best and most inventive work has often been driven by competition. A visible and serious threat is the only situation where leadership, historically, was forced to be creatively aggressive, giving a  chance for creatives to obtain enough power to do good work.  Windows 95, Office 95, Internet Explorer 5.0, MS Natural Keyboard, XBOX 360 were all excellent products by most standards, and were made possible by strong competition. The question executives need to ask is why divisions like Mobile & MSN,or the entire Vietnam like 15 year history of imploding efforts of web search (there is a great book to be written by someone about this), have been disasters despite clear and strong competition – this is the analysis to post on every office door at the rest of the company.
  6. It’s lazy arguing to assume an organization of 10,000 or 100,000 is uniform in any way. Groups at Microsoft have a different culture, and some have been wildly more successful than others (e.g. Office vs. MSN/Live/whatever it’s called this week) in part because their leaders have developed superior cultures that diverge widely from other groups. Windows 7 is an excellent product no matter how it stands in comparison to Apple’s work, and the turnaround from Windows Vista, which many heralded as the end of MSFT, was beyond noteworthy.  If Windows 7 or XBOX 360  is made in the same company that makes all the products you hate, you have to realize the limits of painting broad strokes. This is where many critiques of Microsoft fall short, including the one by Brass. They assume uniformity, projecting a local set of experiences in part of the company as the model for the entire company.
  7. If you talk only to people who quit and were disgruntled you can’t possibly have the whole story.  I’ve never met Dick Brass, but I know the Tablet PC was a commercial failure. As smart as Dick is, its likely he never understood how IE beat Netscape (it was more than the monopoly stuff), or Office beat Lotus/WordPerfect etc.  He also might not know the long history of Windows and Office rejecting most requests from most other teams as a matter of both basic sanity and arrogance. Specific to Tablet PC, it started as a Bill Gates pet project. Working with Bill, who Dick curiously never mentions, was no treat, and unlike Steve Jobs, his direct involvement in matters of design is likely not a godsend. Articles like this one reads too much into corporate policies, as many of them are old (e.g. the review process) and good managers have always had ways to work within these rules to reward good employees. I’d agree the processes could be improved, but all the good VPs find ways to bend rules into loopholes.
  8. The greatest disease at Microsoft is lack of sharing lessons from failure, especially where innovation is concerned. Microsoft has made many big, visible bets. Many of them have failed, but that’s par for the course. The problem is these expensive lessons are swept under the rug, encouraging others in the company to repeat the same mistakes. Everyone loves to make fun of Microsoft Bob, but few can articulate why it failed. If you don’t understand why it failed, you don’t have any reason for laughing so hard, and you likely aren’t half as smart as you think you are. A case study on Vista, MSN Search, Microsoft Bob, The Tablet PC, etc. should be produced by an outside consultant, and stapled on the forehead of every manager at the company, once a day, until they read them all word for word. Then they’d take advantage of Microsoft’s so called experience and wisdom. Otherwise, they are being set up to make the same expensive mistakes again and again.
  9. The idea of Innovation, and Innovation Systems, is a distraction. Success in the market is a better scorecard and the most reliable source of criticism. Innovation, as the word is used in these articles, is a matter of taste. You can be very inventive and still get your ass kicked. Or do a great job with mostly conventional ideas, and kick more interesting competitors off the field. Apple, if you study their choices, doesn’t pull things out of the sky (digital music players, cell phones, and tablet PCs were all established ideas).  They enter games others are already playing and kick their ass. But innovation is the least useful lens. The best criticism of Microsoft’s management is how, or how not, they’ve done against their competitors in terms of customer satisfaction. If innovation matters as much as people seem to claim it does, it’s well reflected in either market success or customer satisfaction, so worry more about those solid measures, rather than the ethereal notion of who is innovative and who isn’t.

The future of UI – interview on CBC

The folks at CBC’s Spark show interviewed me about the future of UI, and the boring post.

Good stuff on innovation, ui design, whether I’m a curmudgeon or not, the Ipad and more. ~10:00 long.

To listen:

Challenging Newton’s Apple

Recently The Royal Society put their copy of the best evidence in the world about the fabled story of Newton watching an apple fall up on the web. NPR picked up the story here.

In my besteller, the Myths of Innovation, I spend a chapter exploring the failings of the story, and others like it, and how misused these tales often are.

But I have doubts this event ever took place. The book The Royal Society posted was titled Memoirs of Isaac Newton, written by his friend William Stukeley.

Here are the facts:

  • Stukeley interviewed Newton in 1726. Newton died in 1727. Stukeley published his “Memoirs of Newton’ in 1752 at earliest.  Meaning Newton never saw the book.
  • The story comes from a ‘biographer’ (Stukeley), writing about Newton. Biographers, certainly in 1720, are not objective reporters running around checking facts. They are often fans of their subjects, as Stukeley was of Newton.
  • At the time they talked they were sitting under apple trees.
  • The entire account is written by Stukeley, not Newton, despite the title.
  • The ‘event’ Newton supposedly told Stukeley, happened 60 years earlier.
  • There are few other first person source anywhere, in Newton’s journals or other biographies, of ‘the event’. (Please comment if I’m wrong).

In James Glieck’s excellent biography, Isaac Newton, he strongly suggests Newton offered the story as an metaphoric anecdote, as way to express his curiosity about the world, rather than as a literal tale about specific singular moment that redefined his view of things.

(for Americans: the bit about getting hit on the head was added much later, as often happens with myths. And it appeared in Schoolhouse rock).

Now my point here is not to say epiphanies never happen. Most creative people have them now and then, and I do too (but I argue they are overrated and do not eliminate the hard work and risk that follows them. Newton worked for a decade to complete his theory on gravity that he became famous for). I’m also not questioning Newton’s genius – he was one.  But reasonable doubt about this legend is warranted given the extremely thin evidence we have.

Frankly I don’t trust Stukeley. He was apparently a good friend of Newton’s. Just as I wouldn’t trust a biographer/friend interviewing someone famous late in their life, who somehow manages to tell only them a story about something that happened decades ago, that the famous person never mentioned in any of their own extensive journals and writings or interviews with other people.  I can guess Stukeley wanted Newton to look good. He also wanted his book to be read (though the publishing history of the memoir is unclear). And in the spirit of those two things some exaggeration of facts and conversion of abstract anecdotes into real specific events would not be surprising.

In an article at The Independent, one of the few pieces this week to do research at all, offers this report from an expert at the Royal Society, which owns the manuscript:

“Newton cleverly honed this anecdote over time,” said Keith Moore, head of archives at the Royal Society. “The story was certainly true, but let’s say it got better with the telling.” The story of the apple fitted with the idea of an Earth-shaped object being attracted to the Earth. It also had a resonance with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, and Newton was known to have extreme religious views, Mr Moore said.

Newton had a huge ego and was kind of a jerk. This is undisputed. A living legend telling exaggerated tales about things that happened decades ago seems possible.

I’m surprised that in the history of science so few people have raised any questions at all.

I’d love to see the web help me round out the facts, find experts and other familiar with the sources.  Spread the word.

The limits of innovation

My recent post on why the future of UI will be boring has upset some folks. I tried to clarify that although my prediction is depressing in a way, I don’t make it because I like it. It’s simply that I believe the best and most honest view of the future of replacing keyboards, mice and GUIs is less than good.

But there is a general theory at work here that perhaps I didn’t express well.

One critique that best raised this was from Baldur Bjarnason, who wrote:

What I’m arguing is that automobiles are specialized machines and that automobile users (AKA drivers) have years of highly specific practice which creates a lock-in quite unlike that you see in computing. Computers are different sort of tools with different sort of uses. Umbrella handles and door knobs do not require skill or training and have converged on a simplistic optimal design.

The lack of change in the industries you cited have nothing to do with what might hold back innovation in computing. That is, they did not prove your point in any way. They were non sequiturs.

They are non sequiturs only superficially. I believe there is a pattern of limits on change that effect most industries, ideas, and things. Physical interfaces in particular have natural limits on how they are likely to work. It’s possible to overcome them, but it’s unlikely.

Here are some more seeming non-sequiturs, but bear with me for a moment.

There is a reason all airplanes have wings. The contact point, or interface, between the plane and the air has certain unavoidable properties. Although wings have changed much in 100 years, they are fundamentally the same kind of interface model, or metaphor. Why? The fundamental principles of physics at work have not changed. If someone asked, as Gruber did “why have we had the same interface model for airplanes for 50 years?” I’d give the same answer. And yes, I know we have helicopters . Arguably a chopper blade is a kind of wing, but that’s a thin, ha ha, pun intended, argument. Better argument – have they replaced airplanes?

And even if we invented a superior wing that was all loops and circles and made of lightweight eatable alien space cheese/steel , how long would it take to for the majority of airplanes to use that new design? 10 years? 30? It takes a long long time for people to replace things in sufficient quantities to become the dominant design. It’s expense too. And it’s not great for the environment to replace working things with new things that are only marginally better.

Cars and trucks have wheels, a wheel being perhaps the most efficient way to bring power from the engine into reliable contact with a road. It’s a safe bet, given the fundamental nature of roads and engines, that wheels will be with us for a long time, even as cars change greatly in other ways. Wheels are about 3000 years old. I’m doubtful we will innovate our way out of using wheels for most heavy moving objects. The wheels might be made of unobtanium, or fried chicken, or there might be two wheels or 40, but wheels they will be.

When it comes to desktop computing, the human body is the interface. Given the constraints of our fingers, hands, elbows, and eyes, and our need to use character based languages, plus the dominant activity of reading and writing when at our desks, there are constraints on what kinds of designs can work well.  Minority Report UI and VR are un-likely to ever be dominant for ergonomic reasons (still looking for any evidence from makers of these things that they are ergonomically sound) – fun to watch, fun to play with, good for niche situations, but if you did it for hours a day your elbows would melt. They also don’t do much to improve email, or reading web pages.

Odds are good most change will occur in places where there are fewer physical limits.

I’d concede there is more room for UI innovation in mobile computing, or even in gaming, than desktop computing, simply because unlike the desktop, we’ve spent much less effort designing for those physical environments and interactions. There is way more uncharted territory to cover, but even there, the human body is one unavoidable constraint to big ideas. New things born from dreams inevitably interact with the limitations of hands and eyes, constraining the range of designs likely to be successful.  And even if those mobile and gaming devices see radical new discoveries, only some will transfer back to the different constraints of desktop computing.

Shell wrote, in the comments:

Will we still be using keyboards in 20 years time? Probably, in some form. We also still use pens and paper after 1000s of years too.

The UI of a pen is a great example. The reason why pens are the same has less to do with what’s possible technologically, or that there aren’t amazing ideas out there, but more to do with with the limitations of good interfaces for human hands. The highest-tech pen I’ve seen, the LiveScribe, which has a ridiculous number of interesting ideas in it, has the same core physical interface and interaction model of the ball point pen I used in high school.

And the last argument for the limits of innovation has  to do with human nature. Why we choose to adopt things is not a logical process, and is fueled by culture, psychology, timing, and a dozen factors, many which have little to do with new idea X being better than old idea Y in technological or design terms. Those are terms technologists and designers obsess about, despite history’s strong suggestion that those factors are overestimated in their role for what becomes dominant, and when.

The simple question of what it would take Apple, Microsoft and Logitech, three companies that dominate the business of keyboards, mice, and GUIs, to abandon those well understood designs and businesses in favor of something new. Or for a new venture to choose to compete against the entrenched powers of those three. And then to be successful at it beyond a niche capacity. The human elements around adoption of innovation are just as formidable as the technological or design ones, especially when we’re talking about the wholesale replacement of one metaphor for doing things with another.

Progress is great. Show me something better and I’ll champion it with all my heart. Explain to me the problem we need to solve and I’ll advocate for its elimination at the top of my lungs. I’m thrilled to see experiments, and risks and people who say damn the odds I’m building it anyway. I’m a damn the odds kind of guy. But before we herald anything as the next whatever, lets be honest about what we have, what the real problems are, what’s involved in change, and what’s likely to happen. I can’t see any other credible way to improve the odds of progress.

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