[Sigia-l] office redesign (was: Nielsen: It's the end! (long))

[Karl Fast]

> There isn't an iota of originality in what the new Office proposes.
> Every aspect of it has been done by various apps on multiple
> platforms for years. 

Is that the purpose of the Office redesign? To be original? 

I thought the purpose was to design a better interface that made
working with Office documents easier and faster. I thought it was
about usability and learnability. I thought it was about making the
features of Office more accessible and more untuitive and less
confusing. I thought it was about redesigning Office so that it
better supported the activity of writing a document or crunching a
spreadsheet or creating a presentation.

Does that require an original design? An innovative design?

I am all for originality and innovation. I have to be. These days I
do academic research, which places a high value on original and
innovative thinking. If the research is not original, then usually
it is not publishable.

But I question the idea that good software products must also be
original or innovative. The first version of Word wasn't original.
Neither was the first version of WordPerfect, or dBase, or Lotus
1-2-3. The same goes for MacOS, or NextSTEP, or BeOS. All of these
borrowed liberally from existing products that either failed or had
short-term success. They might have been influential, like Visicalc
or the Xerox Star, but they didn't last. HTML didn't have any new
ideas, other than simplicity, and the same can be said for XML, CSS,
SVG, PHP, and a bazillion other technologies.

Originality and innovation are desireable attributes. But I don't
see them as necessary attributes for designing good software.

Now I haven't used the new Office, so I don't know if it *is* good.
I've only watched the video on Channel 9. It certainly looks like an
improvement. I think it's a major improvement. A good one.

So what if it isn't that original?


BTW, the office video is here:

  http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720


-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/