You may not be entirely pleased to learn the full extent of Microsoft's influence over the next generation of business and home PCs.
Microsoft wants the next generation of personal computers to be more usable. Who could disagree? But PC buyers may be more than a little surprised, and not entirely pleased, to learn the full extent and direction of Microsoft's influence over the capabilities and design details of the next generation of business and home machines.
PC usability is a goal that we all can share, and Microsoft's role in usability engineering is huge. We're talking about a company that watches users from behind one-way mirrors, that sent video crews into 100 homes to see what people find confusing or difficult about the experience of personal computing.
Among the memorable findings of Microsoft usability research: "Options" is a far more understandable menu item than "Preferences," and PC setup illustrations should not show the monitor sitting on top of the system unit without explaining that this is just one possible configuration. One family in the study spent 15 minutes agonizing over whether they could depart from the setup diagram to put the monitor directly on a desk, with the system unit off to the side or underneath.
But Microsoft wants the next generation of systems to be easier to support with software, whether or not we're ready to leave old hardware standards behind. The company insists that "Retail components and components included with a system must not use the ISA expansion bus." If your favorite special-purpose card is an ISA-only design, you'd better keep an old PC to support it.
"For desktop and mobile systems," the Microsoft guidelines continue, "no peripherals that use the parallel or serial ports can be included with the system." Forget about parallel-port printers or conventional external modems.
Moreover, there must be "No BIOS text displayed during startup." If you want to know what's inside your box, you'll have to open the case or build the machine yourself.
Moving beyond 'boringness'
At this week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (or WinHEC) in Anaheim, Microsoft clearly took upon itself the burden of nudging PC makers toward building the kind of systems that will reinvigorate the PC market -- to purge what Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine called the "boringness" of the essentially static buyer view of what a PC is and does.
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