An Age of Higher Expectations
- Posted January 12th, 2007
- Filed under: Technology
Software and its users have entered an age of higher expectations. Although business software is hardly leading the charge, it’s starting to catch up.
Once upon a time, business software was business software. Nobody got too excited about it, if by “excited” we understand something positive. Except, of course, for the people whose business it was to sell the software and a few pointy-haired analysts who knew what to do with the numbers it was increasingly possible to wrangle.
As more companies realized the competitive advantages of computerizing aspects of their day-to-day workflow, the market for business software grew exponentially. Competition was fierce for this new market. Alongside aggressive sales, the makers of business software relied on vendor lock-in to keep their customers buying their products and related upgrades whether the customers wanted to or not.
Nobody was too happy with this arrangement, if by “nobody” we understand anybody besides the makers of business software. Those in charge of buying decisions had to negotiate upgrades and additional licenses with effective monopolies. And those on the user end too often found themselves wrestling with obtuse interfaces, inscrutable user manuals and cryptic error messages.
Then, the Internet happened. While it didn’t change the old, bad ways of business software all at once, it caused people to understand computers and their use in a new light.
Between the advent of email, holding virtual garage sales on Ebay, and viewing homes on local real estate web sites, people who previously thought of computers as an obligation, began to think of them as an opportunity. They began to ask what computers could do for them in their work and daily lives.
Another, less obvious change came about because the Internet was predicated on the concept of “open standards”. There wasn’t a separate Internet for Microsoft users, Macintosh users, and scraggly-bearded Unix wizards. Software could be designed to work together across platforms. When it did, it became far more useful to everybody. If it made sense to browse the World Wide Web via Netscape, people did so. If they liked Internet Explorer, they could use that instead. People came to expect choices.
And the Web itself became a domain of choice. Some web sites were weak in content, ugly, unusable. Others, like Amazon.com, offered something not available hitherto and worked assiduously to reduce the amount of “friction” in a user’s experience. The distance between one web site and its competitors was never any greater than a stroke of a mouse. Customer acclaim became such a decisive factor that some fledgling ventures neglected fundamentals in its pursuit.
When software met the Internet, the relationship between the makers of software and its users was reconfigured — to the users’ benefit. My blog entries will examine this convergence, and consider how innovations like Open Source, social software, and the increasing attention to user experience are shaping the way businesses of all sizes are using technology to accomplish their goals.
