via Daring Fireball.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (aka FakeSteve)
For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered “thought leaders,” and who definitely have Microsoft’s attention. They’ve been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They’ve done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, “Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy.” They don’t want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go “unlock value” and get customers to use all those features that they’ve already told Microsoft they don’t want.
and
Remember Detroit in the 1970s, when customers started saying they wanted smaller, cheaper, leaner, simpler cars? Toyota and Honda listened, while the Big Three kept cranking out monstrously huge cars and then putting all sorts of effort (advertising, discounts on the lot, dealer incentives, blackballing dealers who tried to open Toyota or Honda stores, spouting empty patriotic rhetoric about buying American, blah blah) thinking that by doing this they could get customers to buy the cars that they’d already told Detroit they didn’t want.
Oh yes….. Sounds rather familiar. I have not bothered with Office 2007 or Vista, ‘cos 2003 and XP (and now MacOS) does what I want, and a LOT more. I have Office Mac on my laptop, but I think I’ve loaded it twice. Maybe. The google ones are good enough for me, so far. Leaner. Meaner. Cleaner :)
Development is slightly different: TextMate is too light (for RoR). Visual Studio 2005 is “about right”, maybe a little heavy for (my) .NET. Neither is quite right….
