With the exceptions of Surface and the Xbox, Microsoft has generally sucked with user interfaces. It provides a lot of potential value in its products but if people don’t get access to or use that value, it is effectively worthless. While Vista isn’t doing that poorly considering the bad press that has surrounded it, it clearly didn’t excite the market as Windows 95 initially did or the iPhone does.
With every OEM looking at the iPhone and now capable of articulating what they want, Microsoft is getting a message it can’t ignore: It has to fix the user interface for Windows and the rest of its desktop products dramatically. It also now knows if it doesn’t do this, it won’t move Windows 7 and, like every company, Microsoft wants sales volume. Finally, Windows is a keystone product, which means if new versions of Windows don’t sell, neither will the new versions of all of the products it and others make that run on it.
But the OEMs aren’t trusting Microsoft to execute. For the first time in decades, they are working on their own interfaces, which can be layered on Windows to help give a level of experience vastly closer to the iPhone than what we have now. We saw the first one of these from HP on its TouchSmart product. I’m expecting more from others as they figure out that this is the likely path to having a product that could do to the PC segment what Apple just did to the phone segment.
On the mobile side, while Microsoft works to close the competitive gap by enhancing significantly the user interface in its mobile platform, there are firms like HTC with its Touch, and Neonode with the only phone that comes close to what the iPhone Mini is likely to become, both based on Microsoft technology and both utilizing improvements made by their individual owners.