Why Windows Phone 7 will fail

16 October 2010

Windows Phone 7 is yet another disaster from accident prone Microsoft. Do not expect it to revive either Microsoft's mobile market share, or Microsoft's share price. Analyst Carolina Milanesi at Gartner is wrong to describe Windows Phone 7 as a "good effort" which has come so late to market that it will probably founder in spite of its worthiness. On the contrary, this article explains why Windows Phone 7 has all the buoyancy of a lead balloon, it also explores the key concept of functional and aesthetic convergence in the philosophy of design (the philosophical principle of "good and beautiful" bifurcated unity which was described by Socrates, and which explains the famous modernist industrial design mantra: "form follows function").

The screen shot below shows the Apple iPhone 4, a Samsung Android Phone, and the new Samsung Windows Phone 7 phone (right).

Look at the three screen shots above taken from the Apple and Samsung web sites (on 16-Oct-2010). Begin by comparing the iPhone and the Android. Notice how the green Android background makes the icons hard to see, and is too loud - the iPhone's grey bubble background is a more practical and stylish choice. Of course users can change the background, but the default choices made by Apple and Samsung testify to their differing design skills. The Android design is full of flaws, notice the Android Google Search box, what a remarkably ugly waste of space, can you imagine Steve Jobs advertising the iPhone with that thing on the screen?! Why are the Android icons so small and cartoon like? Notice in several cases the writing under icons is wider than the icon itself, madness. Look how the reception, battery life and time icons confusingly clutter up the top right of the display. Look at the prominently placed ugly grey dots at the top of the Android display, compare them with Apple's sleek subtly placed equivalent. Notice the iPhone's stylish 3D tray which gently groups the bottom four icons, by comparison the flat green band on the Android is decidedly brutal. Compared to the iPhone, Samsung's Android GUI isn't just unpolished, it looks like a high school project. The Samsung's Android's design flaws likely stem from a combination of ignorance and copyright infringement fears.

Now consider the Microsoft Phone. How does it hit you? Compared to the iPhone is it upmarket or downmarket? Compared to the Android is it complex or simple? In fact it's that infamous Vista feeling again - simple fonts, childlike shapes, garish colours, irresponsible use of screen space, sometimes pointlessly simple, occasionally pointlessly cluttered. It's decidedly downmarket - a perfect example of what I like to call "Wal-Mart GUI".

A few years ago I wrote an article about Apple and Microsoft and the history of the GUI in which I said Steve Jobs has demonstrated the crucial role aesthetics and design play in public appeal. Steve Jobs once said "The trouble with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no taste - and I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a really big way." His top down management style delivers a clarity of vision and aesthetic standard few technology companies can match - compare an iBook with an HP Laptop. Microsoft, Google, DELL, HP, Motorola and many other technology firms desperately need to shed their geeky cultures - think Ferrari vs Star Trek. The 21st Century tech industry will belong to the designers not the geeks.

Consider, for example, the car industry. The Germany company Volkswagen is replacing Toyota as the world's most successful car manufacturer. One of its famous brands, Audi, uses the advertising slogan "Vorsprung durch Technik", which means "Progress through Technology". Yet this slogan doesn't have the populist energy of Google or Facebook, it's about frighteningly disciplined long term aesthetic & engineering perfectionism. Perhaps we can divide the maturation of the car industry into three theoretical phases: the geeky period of early innovation (think of early racing cars), the soulless period of commercial exploitation (think of the boxy Ford Model T), and then the triumph of idealistic craftsmanship (think of the sleek aluminium Audi TT). The first period fails because the geeks fail to detach from themselves, and the second period fails because the capitalists loose their love and eventually revolt their customers with populist shallowness. Mastering the third stage is notoriously difficult for the US, if you think about the world's best cars or cameras or vacuum cleaners etc they tend to come from Europe or Asia. The US tends to loose its lead as technology matures because it has a downmarket culture, meaning a culture not concerned with perfectionism in function or aesthetics but rather wallowing in the self. Germans, for example, are known for religious pride in their products, whereas Americans care more about personal success, and that lack of idealism manifests in a crass populism which hoodwinks and titillates the user rather than making the world a genuinely better place. Steve Jobs worked extremely hard to break that American mindset, he was inspired by Japanese perfectionism and he said (approximately): "It's really hard to design by focus groups. We think the Mac can sell millions but in a way we built it for ourselves. We don't go out and do market research, we try to become experts and build the best we can. You have to clean up your mind, you have to focus in a single minded way and find the passionate commitment to transcend dogma and populism. Most people are too impatient, but once you have that clarity you can move mountains."

Long ago, before Microsoft became a kool-aid drinking populist giant, it designed GUI to be functionally optimal for power users- efficient use of screen space, menus in hierarchal logical order, tree views in file dialogues, customizable toolbars etc. Of course, nothing is perfect, Microsoft design still had its faults, for example the famously dreadful typography, also the overwhelming detail sometimes had more chaos that coolness. Nevertheless, the optimal power user GUI has a certain beauty, and Windows XP is still by far Microsoft's best loved product. London's most famous museum of modern art, the Tate Gallery, recently hung a Harrier Jump Jet from the ceiling. Of course the designers of the Harrier did not set out to make a work of art, just a fighter jet, why did it turn out beautiful? The artist responsible for the Harrier installation said: "As a child I was walking in the Welsh Hills with my father. It was so quiet and so beautiful and then suddenly this Harrier Jump Jet appeared out of nowhere and completely ripped up the sky and utterly changed the moment. The words were knocked out of us, wondering how something that was such a monster could be so beautiful." Functional perfection has beauty because it exudes intellectual idealism, divine complexity, divine power. Back in the power user days, Microsoft shares were on fire, and Bill Gates was lauded as a god.

Then, in 1998, Steve Jobs started capturing the hearts of consumers with his stunning iMac, iBook, iPod, iPhone etc. The Microsoft geeks were mortified, and set out to make their products more consumer oriented. The geeks examined the iMac and OSX, looking for its secrets. They didn't notice the gorgeous hardware, also the way you don't need a lifetime's experience with regedit.exe to keep the machine running, instead they noticed the task bar with the smiling face, stamp and guitar. Eureka they said, we know what to do, make it cool! Being geeks, they did not understand that Steve Job primarily captures hearts with beauty - instead Microsoft focused on pimped up and dumbed down design, eg Vista & Office Ribbon. Imagine the world suddenly turning its back on the Harrier Jump Jet because they realise the stylish Learjet is a more practical consumer choice. So Microsoft hid the after burner switch and painted their jet in Fisher Price baby toy colours. Everyone hated it; the ace fliers couldn't find the after burners, the stylish fliers hated the childlike paint job, and the normal fliers realised that even with garish buttons and hidden switches Harriers are a nightmare to fly.

Back in the 1950s geeks were scientists, and the coolest people in society, but then they found politics and fantasy games, and by the 1970s they had started to become disturbing "nerds". What is the archetypal geek personality today? A person without empathetic skills, a person without artistic skills. Although he has technical intelligence, it is as if a bit of his brain is missing, the bit that senses the big picture psychological energy underlying life. Remember that film Rain Man? He thinks he is very smart, but outside of his special area of interest he comes across to everyone else as an unsophisticated naïve simpleton. He feels like he knows how to run the world, but everyone else thinks he is clueless and this creates a deep down burning anger and pain at his inadequacy. Bad cases become increasing isolated, and the ones who can't find girlfriends and hang onto any semblance of sanity become conspiracy theory maniacs and a danger to society. The geek dresses badly, he has little interest in music, his political believes are cartoon like absurdities, eg hard core anarcho-capitalist libertarian ideology. His introversion and lack of empathy makes him selfish and paranoid, he doesn't spend money, he invests in gold because the world is going to collapse. Remember the millennium bug? Now he worries about the world financial system. His favourite film is the "Bourne Supremacy", it features a paranoid emotionally disturbed guy dodging the secret service within a meaningless atheistic universe. The archetypal geek is not even a tidy person, he has no pictures on the walls, just shelves full of dusty junk. Strip away his technical skills and what do you have? A Wal-Mart person with unjustified self confidence. These days Microsoft is exactly that. It's motto is: built by geeks, for simpletons.

Remember the old days of mobile phone - most of us bought the gorgeous banana shaped Nokia that showed up in The Matrix, but nerds and losers always went for the cheap loud Nokia in bright pink or alien green. Like children, nerds and losers love loud colours and bells and whistles. Even today PC Manufacturers festoon their horrible laptops with extra keys and multiple stickers, nerds and losers love these 'features'.

Microsoft's last pimped up and dumbed down phone, The Kin, flopped disastrously, so they have designed a new one, this time it also has Xbox games and widgets. What the hell happed to the business user? In fact Microsoft are no longer even chasing Apple, they are repositioning themselves at very bottom of the market, at people who have neither intellectual or aesthetic skills - the loud Nokia brigade. Not only will this downgrading of the Microsoft brand fail to sell large numbers of phones, it will further tarnish Microsoft's reputation in the business community.

If you walk into Wall-Mart you will see the childlike fonts, the garish colours and the chaotic shelves. Yes, downmarket energy sells. A year or two ago Wall-Mart experimented with more upmarket interior design - sales went down not up. But the key to really understanding Microsoft failure is to realize that smart phones and computers do not work in a downmarket format. It's not just because smart phones are aspirational products; it is also because ugliness is not just energetic, it is about intelligence - ugliness is bad functionality. In Wall-Mart that doesn't matter, in a complex product it does.

Why is ugliness bad functionality? If one analyses the aesthetic choices of designers very carefully, one sees that much of what they are doing is actually optimizing functionality not adding personality, even though the designers themselves are not necessarily aware of it. That background is loud and distracting, tone it down. That plain grey is hard to look at, add some complexity. Try an image, no it's distracting, how about some neutral bubbles. Why have you put a big red bullseye on the power button? The user is going to figure out where the power button is and remember it, you don't need to do that. This is a phone not the emergency exit of a plane, use an appropriate energy. Yes that's right kids, that means killing the blue flashing LED signal light added by those nerds in the wifi team. Laptops are notoriously fragile, let's cast them from a single block of aluminium. What shall we do with the screen? Lets use the world's toughest glass. Wow look how sexy the iPad looks now. How strange, is beauty wisdom?

There is a very deep philosophical principle at work here - functional idealism and aesthetic idealism converge. This is why Plato called God both good and beauty. Plato's famous dialogue Greater Hippias talks about this convergence, but I think modern readers will find it easier to understand the philosophical point by thinking about iPhones instead of fine cooking pots. So a geek can create beauty by following the functional path, and an artist can create good by following the inspirational path. Taken to the ultimate extreme they both arrive at divinity, they are the yin and yang of idealism. Microsoft's were doing OK when they focused on the functional path, but wow betide the geek who turns his hand to art! Ironically, the reviews of Microsoft's Kin said great hardware, horrible GUI. For all the billions spend on Kin it's hardly surprising Microsoft's hired hardware designers did a good job, a better job than any of the Windows Phone 7 hardware vendors have done. Now they have horrible hardware and horrible GUI!

Let's get back to a detailed analysis of the Windows Phone 7 GUI. The whole live tile concept is fatally flawed. Efficient use of screen space is key to a good mobile OS, yet this is made impossible by the large tile size - look at the screenshots above, the iPhone user has 20 apps to click on, the Windows Phone user has 7. Also consistency is critical to aesthetics, but the content changing tiles bring distraction, confusion and discordance - notice the horrible 'People' tile. Integrating Facebook may be Steve Ballmer's idea of cool, but look at that People tile again, don't immerse the user in a sea of chaotic eye candy which destroys the harmonious utility of the design. On an iPhone you don't see people's photos when you bring up the contacts list, that's geek GUI, children's GUI, Wal-Mart GUI. Failing to implement multi-tasking, copy paste, tethering, exchange email etc is fatal. The latest technology should leapfrog the competition, Microsoft didn't kill Lotus Notes by releasing a less advanced spreadsheet. Even launching without important programs such as Skype is dangerous. The application sand box is a pointless limitation in an App Store world. Microsoft have taken the downmarket path and are especially focusing on games in synergy with their Xbox platform, but why then did they not add extra case controls to improve game play (eg PSP)?

In summary, Windows Phone 7 is not a good effort, it is utterly appalling. Why are so many tech sites giving it positive reviews? Because, like Microsoft, like the tech industry in general, these tech sites are staffed by nerds not designers! What about the intellectual Stephen Fry Microsoft rolled out by Microsoft on the launch day - he liked it. If Microsoft's philosophical failing is geeky populism, surly that endorsement counts. No, Stephen Fry is a not intellectual, he is a gauky comedian who pokes fun at idealism. Ignore them all, Windows Phone 7 will bomb!

One of the big problems of Western World entrepreneurial capitalism is bad delegation of responsibility. It's not necessarily about Apple's famously top down management style, but it is about anti-egalitarian elitism. It is about building a hive of unidirectional specialists, not an omnidirectional herd. Microsoft treat the programmers and marketing managers like designers instead of geeks and charlatans. Microsoft don't have the guts to say these guys know absolutely nothing about GUI, lock them in the basement and call in the trendy London design team. So Apple rules the world of GUI, not because GUI is difficult, but because big companies keep treating GUI as an IT project instead of a design project. Hardware is much easier, not just because it is simpler, but also because there is an established market for hardware product designers. GUI is more difficult and still done by in-house IT nerds.

The other big problem with Western World entrepreneurial capitalism is a lack of idealism and an excess of materialism. The Microsoft heart is not overflowing with idealism, it is primarily about money. So when they realised that Steve Jobs was winning over the consumers, they just focused on his market share in a superficial way. They didn't look deeply, they didn't ask themselves what they were doing wrong. Instead they assumed that selling to consumers is about downmarket design. But an idealist would never have done that, he would never deliberately create tat, he would find something good in consumer design. Of course that good is functional and aesthetic, what I call design. Perhaps that is why Bill Gates tired of Microsoft, it lost its goodness. Steve Jobs is that rare CEO who really cares about his product, not just his bottom line. Apple vs Microsoft, idealistic authoritarian designer vs materialistic individualistic geek. It is a proper modern tragedy, what a shame Aeschylus is not alive to write about it.

Note: I am a long-time Apple shareholder, but I am certainly not a diehard apple fan. I do not use Apple's OS X, but I do have all their gadgets. The iPad is far from perfect - for example, the iPad's key selling point is its browser, yet it is a nightmare of accidental clicks and copy/paste operations, also limited tabs and annoying page refreshes. The development environment (iOS Objective-C) is ghastly and apps crash constantly, it testifies to Apple's real lack of hard core in-house programming skills. Apple TV hurts, if Steve Jobs had pushed harder he could have monopolised the internet TV market by now and made me a rich man, instead Apple TV is hobbled by both the limited content and the hopeless interface. Yet what is the competition doing? They are taking on the iPad by launching devices with smaller, not bigger, screens! Owning Apple shares is not about Apple greatness, rather staggeringly incompetent competition.

UPDATE 27-OCT-2011: Nokia Lumia 800 Prospects