I think Google Android may become the Microsoft Windows of the mobile world. And I don’t mean it in the all-pervasive, market dominating sense (which Google may well also achieve, but that’s not the subject of this essay).
I mean it in the sense of how Windows has become an unintuitive operating system experience where users get used to doing things in the most unintuitive ways (you turn of the computer by clicking the “Start” button) and begin to forget what an intuitive experience should feel like.
A recent article by Robert Scoble brought this to light:
The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone
The differences in user experience appear to reflect the different approaches in software and interface design held by Apple and Google (and Microsoft).
In the former, software is tied to and tailored for a very specific hardware platform (the iPhone) built by a single manufacturer, and so the software’s capabilities and user experience can be designed (and to some extent perfected) for the hardware. This has been Apple’s approach to hardware and software since its inception, and is also what cost Apple its market share.
In the latter (two), software is designed to work on a variety of hardware platforms (the growing variety of Android phones) built by many different manufacturers, and so the software is unable to dictate the standardisation (and optimisation) of user experience across all hardware platforms. This was Microsoft’s approach to its operating system, and while it meant widespread adoption of Windows by almost-all-but-one hardware manufacturer and eventual market dominance by Microsoft in the operating system space, it has clearly played a part in the kind of user experience we have with Windows today.
So operating systems seem to have to choose between creating a great experience for a single hardware platform, or settling for not-so-great experiences that work on multiple hardware platforms. Based on that, I’m glad Apple doesn’t license its operating systems.
Postscript: Some might argue that Android is more like Linux than Windows. Yes it is, from a technical perspective, but from a user experience perspective, Linux faces the same problems as Windows in having to be flexible enough to support a variety of hardware platforms and hence being unable to deliver as tight and coherent an experience as OS X.
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