John Porcaro on computer/tech marketing:
“Something I’ve found interesting (culturally speaking) about marketing is that I’m finding some people in this industry struggling with the fact that we’re marketing to a different audience now. When a lot of our most senior marketers were hired, Operating Systems (and PC’s) were sold to early adopters, technically-savvy “end users”, systems admins, corporate IT groups, people who wanted us to talk in bits and bytes and speeds and feeds. Now that 80% of households have PCs, and nearly everyone has a PC on their desk at work, our customers are very, very different than they were just a few years ago.”
This is particularly becoming a problem–or opportunity (depending on how you want to see it)–for OSs.
I’ll put my engineering hat on and say it another way: Techniques that worked yesterday when the markets were smaller may not work equally as well with today’s and tomorrow’s burgeoning market size.
Almost all the computer savvy friends I know spend some portion of their time helping their friends and families with viruses, spyware, fixing networking problems, and the like. This won’t continue to scale.
That’s why I’m so excited about products such as the Tablet PC and Smart Phones which expand how and where we use computers. They give us engineering types a fresh perspective on how things ought to be done.
Take something as simple as the right click in Windows. I love ’em. But you have to admit that right clicking on something to see if it has a hidden set of options isn’t that obvious. Basically, you have to learn to right click on everything and learn what does and does not have a context menu. Well, this isn’t a big deal, until the Tablet PC came along. Right clicking with a pen is a pain. It’s doable, but slower and/or more awkward than with a mouse.
In response, Tablet developers are coming up with new ways to get to options in a program without right clicking. OneNote pops up small buttons when the cursor hovers over an element in a page, for instance. No more guessing if there are options available. If you cursor to an area, you’ll see something indicating that there are options and all you need to do is click on the button to get to them. No more right click.
What’s interesting is that this is probably a better way to get to these context-based operations all along. And there are more issues like this that surface with Tablets too. Instant on is another–something that one could argue should be in all Windows platforms anyway–but definitely of value with a highly mobile Tablet.
It very well may be that the usage demands placed on devices such as the Tablet PC–which alter our view of how and when people use computers–will inspire new user interface capabilities that will benefit the whole market. Wouldn’t it be cool to come up with one?