With all the Apple hype out there, I have come to realize what really makes Apple the company it is today. For a long time, I thought it was purely because Apple controlled both the hardware and software side of things. But, it's more than just controlling the different aspects of hardware and software. It's design. Steve Jobs was all about design. His singularly focused fanaticism on design results in Apple products that everyone either really wants or can't stop talking about.
The point of this post is a case describing the other end of the spectrum where design and usability is nothing more than an marketing topic. This example is quite simple really. I installed a piece of software call Kurzweil 3000 on a few machines. The department had not yet purchased new licenses for these machines so I had to install the trial version while we waited for the licenses to arrive. When they did arrive, I checked out some documentation online that said I had to merely call up the registration process under the existing installations Help menu and enter in the code to activate the software. The link to the registration process was not available. I called Kurzweil Support and they told me that I had to uninstall the old version first and then install the new version. Instead of taking a couple minutes to complete the process, I'm now over an hour into this update process.
Simple thing like design and usability can go such a long way.
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