Betalogue

Gotta love Microsoft. I know it’s just a marketing manager (Sheridan Jones) speaking, but still:

“We really worked hard on the user interface of Office 2008 for Mac, but we worked just as hard on enhancing the usability.”

So according to her, you can work on the user interface without actually working on usability? You can change the user interface without affecting usability? Interesting… Very interesting…

That says a lot about what “user interface” means for Microsoft engineers, doesn’t it? As far as I can tell, what “user interface” really refers to in this statement and in Microsoft’s thinking is the visual appearance of the user interface. So what Ms. Jones is saying is that Microsoft worked really hard on the visual appearance of the applications, but also on usability.

Phew. That’s a relief. For a moment, the threat was that Microsoft would have worked on the visual appearance of the applications without any consideration of their actual usability. Imagine that.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.