No longer are they relying on company technicians, or information technology (IT) administrators, to choose the software needed to get the job done. They know how to pluck tools right off the Web.
Industry observers use the term “consumerization” to describe the phenomenon whereby office workers are less likely to wait for the IT folks to equip them. ^
This article turns into a promo for Google, and for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which are applications run through a web interface, but the basic point is true and has been true for over 20 years. IT departments are encumbered by the baggage of each person’s territoriality, so they tend to be — well, “conserative” isn’t the word, but maybe “rigid” or “calcified” is. They are risk-paranoid in the way that presumes that picking an industry favorite saves everyone’s bacon.
Some will blame Microsoft for the stodginess of in-office tools, but I think the problem is inherent to corporate culture. If there’s one way Steve Jobs succeeds, it’s through sheer selfishness. He designs tools he wants to use. Since he’s a power user, but also a slightly flaky individual, his designs turn out appropriate for the end user.
There’s this giant pyramid in software of people all following whatever they perceive the dominant paradigm to be, and until one person gets the power and the will to suggest something else, they following it like lunging lemmings. This is why industry upsets occur where no one realizes how important a search engine can be, or how much the hard drive will change software, or even how pornography will drive changes in the chipset market. They are thinking in terms of whatever their position on the pyramid is, and not looking at the whole context, which is that industry makes tools for people to use.
This tool selection is natural selection. The best tools over time are selected out, with one key caveat: the end-user has no idea of the implications of the tool use over time. This means they are blind to quality, and so buy iPods even though they’re in the shop more than a FIAT. They aren’t aware of secondary and tertiary consequences, so they buy the more convenient interface (the appalling Microsoft Outlook) and ignore the solution that requires customization but is better on the whole (IBM/Lotus Domino/Notes). This is why we need leaders, journalists, editors and CEOs to guide us to better paths. The process of the market by itself is slow.
Microsoft is attempting to adapt strategy to a world of SaaS. They’re embracing open source. They’re acknowledging community standards, even though they’re as flawed as Microsoft’s homebrew stuff. In this way, they’re learning from Apple who in the 80s and 90s made their own version of every standard they encountered, forcing their users to buy mountains of adapters and converters.
Ultimately, I don’t think SaaS will be the new world people want it to be. First of all, the software is only as solid as the network connection, and those still have a way to go. The software is also only as good as its designers, and both open-source and closed-source software products are for the most part incompetent. Do we acknowledge that most software “works” in the narrow definition of “can be forced to complete the task by the user adapting to its eccentricities and remembering them”? But we’ve had a standardized interface for some time now. Software is still pretty bad. The SaaS software I’ve played with seems the same way. Very little is as nearly-flawless as Gmail.
On the other hand, some of the best software ever has come out of the period of desktop standardization brought about by Windows 3.1 and its descendants. Many tasks, like audio and video editing, are best done locally. Many of us prefer the limited control we have over our data when we keep it on our own machines. The problem we encounter is the pyramid of rigidity, which is caused by people in fear of losing their jobs becoming phobic of any ideas that don’t fit the current paradigm, whether those ideas are new or old. They nickle and dime us to death with this paradigm, and then five years later decide it wasn’t right after all. It is frustration with this pyramid, in which IT departments and software companies alike participate, that drives us to download and install software, or run it through the web.
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. ^
I am going to go out on a limb and claim that SaaS is one of these trends. Google, while it has taken a big hit on the news that most internet clickers are not its target market (see above), is still the industry leader. It has built giant data centers for its search and ad delivery business, and now wants to leverage those by applying Gmail to all other software. While Gmail is a winner, it’s a limited function winner, mainly because it super-simplified a task that most need simplified but an elite cadre of power users do not.
The solution has been as it always should have been: keep the user in mind when designing anything. You have to be aware of the limitations of that user’s knowledge, because if given the choice, users will cram software full of features and then complain it’s bloated. You have to show leadership skills and be vigorous about simplifying the workflow, excluding the unnecessary, keeping use cases to provide easily for what 90% of people do but give the remaining 10% a language for understanding what they have to do. No software is intuitive, but the best software is self-consistent in its design, and it comes from these principles.
Intuitive is the big buzz word that everyone likes to use. Folks describe this product or that technology as intuitive or not intuitive. I say go to Botswana Land and find a native who doesn’t know what electricity is, drop a computer in front of him, boot any software you want, and see what’s intuitive about it. Nothing, that’s what. There is no such thing as “intuitive.” We copy the actions of that which we observe. There is nothing natural about any of it, especially when it comes to technology. ^
For now, there is no broad revolution in IT as this article wants us to believe. People have been downloading shareware to work around the limitations of their IT departments for decades. One of the biggest attractions back in the day, since IT didn’t provide them, were screensavers. Before that it was text editors, so we were spared the horror of using a word processor to edit text files. Before that, it was probably NetTrek.
My point is that what makes these “new applications” exciting is not their delivery method, which is what SaaS-fanatics want you to think it is. It’s control and price, which are directly linked. A free application is entirely under the user’s control in that they do not need to invest an opportunity cost of either shelling out themselves, or justifying it to a company when it might fail. It’s “free” as in beer so whether it sinks or swims, they’re clean.
The oddity is that SaaS has spurred the open source, freeware, and shareware authors of the world to think harder about their software. Initially, they seemed to think that because it was free, that was enough, and bad interface, horrible configuration process or flaky runtimes weren’t a big deal. The open source community literally spent years fighting rabidly against anyone who suggested their software was inferior, where in many cases, it was pathetic. They seemed to think “free” and “open” overcame its limitations magically.
In this sense, the open source community was as much part of the pyramid as IT. The whole question of software distills to how well someone addresses the user’s needs. The user, unlike those in the pyramid, has no allegiance to the latest trend dominant paradigm. SaaS may attract the clueless masses coming online, just like AOL did. How long will it last?
[...] SaaS relies on you buying the OS or installing a free one, ditto for browser, and then using your applications online. Problems include: portability of your data, privacy, control of your data and its removal, the unreliablity of internet connections, and the unreliablity of browsers. Advantages: it’s free, no IT department controls it, and someone else updates it. Google is the champion of this paradigm. [...]