Steve Jobs's Worst Design Decisions? - Wall Street Journal (blog)
By Christopher Shea
Steven Johnson has an appropriately laudatory piece about Steve Jobs, in this past weekend's review ("The Genius of Jobs: Marrying Art and Tech"). But Jobs's reign as C.E.O. has hardly been without mistakes, even in the area widely perceived to be his greatest strength: industrial design.
I'm loathe to start a tedious Mac vs. PC flame war (unless it brings in tons of clicks). But I feel the need for a touch of counter-programming. Now, my credentials as an Apple person are pretty sound: I got my first Macintosh my freshman year of college, not long after Johnson did, and I've had an Apple in the house ever since. (My m.o. for the last four years has been to supplement an iMac with a Dell laptop, mainly for economy.) But setting aside errors of strategy or of execution, such as Mobileme (which even Jobs now acknowledges was bungled), where has Apple, which is to say Jobs, blown it when it comes to design—either in terms of aesthetics or usability? Design is his wheelhouse. Where has he whiffed?
Here are a few of my nominees. Others are welcome.
1. Clinging to the one-button mouse for way too long (till 2005, my cursory research suggests). Okay, this one's obvious, a cliché. But Jobs stuck with the one-button mouse long past the point when consumers had voted for the two-button model, whose advantages were legion. My current Logitech mouse comes festooned with six buttons (I use three constantly) and a scroll wheel. Apple mice, in fact, have long been a trouble spot for the company. This model, referred to as "the hockey puck mouse," is perhaps the least favorite of all time.
2. The iMac G4, aka "the lamp" iMac. Nothing particularly wrong with this model, which I owned and used with pleasure. In fact, the highly adjustable screen made it, in some ways, superior to models that superseded it. Yet it appears to have influenced nothing, in terms of design: No one, including Apple, picked up on its style cues in subsequent years. (In contrast, the "Cube," a famous sales failure, had a minimalism that holds up.) Few computers have looked so dated, so soon after being introduced as the new new thing.
3. The current iMac keyboard, which lacks a numerical keypad. I'm in the minority, it seems, in preferring the classic long-travel keys (think Thinkpad) to Apple's newer, shallow, "island-style" buttons. But is there anyone besides Jobs who thinks it made sense to lop off the numerical pad on a computer designed to be users' main workstation? Minimalism is one thing, but Apple users do taxes, too …
3. Glossy screens. The G5 iMacs were the last to ship with matte screens. Since then, Jobs has steadily been expunging no-glare, matte screens from the iMac and laptop lineups. (You can pay extra to get some of the high-end laptops with a matte screen.) Photo editors, people who work in brightly lit offices, and ordinary folks who get headaches looking at themselves in shiny glass as they work have gone so far as to submit petitions begging for more matte options. But just as Jobs doesn't deploy focus groups, so he ignores petitions.
4. "Natural scrolling." If Jobs, by fiat, manages to reverse the way people have used mouse scroll-wheels for the past 25 years, then he truly is a genius. Neither kind of scrolling is "right" or "wrong." But why frustrate the untold numbers of customers who shift between Windows at work and OSX at home? Baffling.
5. Typing on glass. I get that some people like typing on the iPhone's glass. But I'm with David Pogue: "The iPhone approach … is more efficient when you want to type accent marks or change languages. But the rest of the time, no question: the BlackBerry keyboard rules." This may be a case of de gustibus non disputandum, but I suspect the typos on message boards and in my inbox would decline by 50% if Jobs had let up and allowed an iPhone model with a real keyboard. Can a gazillion happy consumers be wrong? Yes. (If you dislike this one, then modify it to: Failing to offer at least one model with a tactile keyboard. That would help the effort to make inroads into corporate America.)
Any other thoughts on Apple design miscues? Things like omitting basic inputs like HDMI or DVI, or turning the corporate back on a popular technology like Flash video, seem to fall into a gray area—partly design, partly tech-spec monomania. Plus, we've probably heard enough about them. I just feel as though the notion that Jobs' design sense has been unerring deserves a little push-back.
No, you can't argue with those profit margins. But design isn't solely about profit, is it?
30 Aug, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNE7Dq1qSqGLGGAZZuynlPRWLgI8rA&url=http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/08/29/steve-jobss-worst-design-decisions/
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