Microsoft Office Is a Tractor Beam for Software
(draft) Innovative apps must resist the pull of looking like Office.
In 1984, Apple's Macintosh brought the desktop metaphor to the masses. Suddenly, using computers was a lot friendlier than it had been just a month before. Of course, it took a decade or more for this to become broadly known, but the effect was pervasive. It became so pervasive that today it is still hard to get away from the desktop metaphor. In a sense, the WIMP interface ate our brains.
In 1989, Microsoft created a marketing bundle of several apps, initially Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, inventing the "office suite". This turned out to be a terrific strategy, since Microsoft had more apps than its main competitors, WordPerfect and Lotus, could muster.
Over that next decade, Microsoft suite vanquished its competitors, becoming the de facto standard for office use. What was a virtuous circle for Microsoft was a vicious cycle for WordPerfect and Lotus.
Later Access, Outlook. Then SharePoint and Teams and other goodies. Now ubiquitous. Became Microsoft's second Golden Goose, alongside Windows and its variants. (In the annals of technology obsolescence trivia, it's worth noting that Microsoft's bundling Encarta in Office really killed Britannica, not Wikipedia.)
(Side note on competing projects inside Microsoft that couldn't challenge Office.)
Getting everyone "literate" on using the WIMP interface and Microsoft Office was a huge lift. Many orgs spent considerable resources to get that done. WIMP/Office literacy is now table stakes for getting a job.
When I call it a tractor beam, what I mean is tktk.
tktk scene from Star Trek with tractor beam
Design traps? Cul-de-apps?
It's like the QWERTY keyboard tktk. Or Boeing not modernizing its cockpits for too long to avoid the retraining expense.
This technological tar pit has been a trap for innovative software. Saw it in Pearltrees, a French company that debuted an interesting mind map in 2009. Makeover when Pinterest got huge. Making it look like Pinterest completely destroyed what made Pearltrees unique and useful.
tktkPearltrees screen cap
I watched this happen again with Prezi, a Hungarian startup also in 2009.
tktkPrezi original screen cap
And this has been a constant threat to that quirky piece of software that I'm addicted to, TheBrain.
Effects on novel approaches.
Mobile sort of shook free.
Goggles might help a bit, but I'll be damned if the file system in Apple's Vision Pro isn't exactly the desktop of folders and app icons.