Will Marlow - Filed under 'Apple'

Where Microsoft missed the mark on their phone

"If you see a stylus, it means they failed." - Steve Jobs discussing Microsoft's next smartphone.

Microsoft pulled its new smartphone (the Kin) off the shelves this month after just 45 days. In D.C. yesterday, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer said, "In the case of phones, I've said this many times before: We missed."

Here's where I think they missed the target: the Kin has buttons, not a touch screen. I know many people love buttons on a device, but here's the problem with buttons: you need to learn what the buttons do. Then, after you've learned what the buttons do, you need to learn what happens on the screen when you touch the buttons. These are two distinct things, and for lots of people, it is very frustrating to learn devices like this. Contrast that with a high quality touch screen: all you need to learn is what happens when you touch the screen. On a device like a phone or a computer, the difference between one layer of complexity (a touch screen) and two layers of complexity (buttons and a user-interface) is staggering.

The goal of both hardware and software is to make the user experience completely intuitive and natural. Microsoft should take a page from Apple and ditch buttons on their next product, just like they ditched the stylus.

Did you like reading this blog post? Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.

Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant. He's the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // Apple License plate Microsoft Steve Ballmer User experience Vanity plate

Comments [2]

One Reason Facebook is Worth Billions of Dollars

(Tomorrow I'll re-continue my posts outlining my next steps in my Twitter experiment to unfollow 12,000 plus people and only re-follow legitimate accounts. Email me with questions on that.)

Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.

It's not just the fact that it has 350 million active users. The more important point is that before any one of those users does something on Facebook, they need to login. That means that, unlike the great majority of websites, which analyze aggregate data and trends, Facebook has names attached to activities. They can measure what you do. Not just what nameless "visitors" do. For this reason, and for a few other good reasons, Facebook has tremendous advantages that get it closer to understanding why you do things. This is the same reason why Google hit such a home run with Gmail. People login (and stay logged in) to Gmail all day. Then, when they search, their searches can be indexed in a personal search history.

The bottom line is, this type of system makes it a lot easier to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time to get them to buy something. That's why Marc Andreessen can say that Facebook will one day "be bigger than Apple" and he's not crazy, even though Apple's 2009 reven ue was $32 billion.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // Apple Facebook Gmail Google Marc Andreessen Valuation Web Analytics