website design, optimisation and content

Garbage in garbage out

Posted by Peter Labrow on 10 August 2009

The old adage of ‘keep it simple stupid’ seems to have eluded Microsoft, which is currently trying to explain no fewer than 66 upgrade permutations to a confused customer base.

It has to be said, clarity of communications is one of my great hobbyhorses. And why not? People are paying less and less attention to verbose marketing guff, average attention spans are slipping, so it’s really important to get your own messages across quickly and clearly.

Which is why I loved stumbling across this chart from Microsoft. Its role is to help you choose which version of Windows 7 to buy and how best to upgrade from your current version.

Click the chart to see the full image

I’m sure if you study it for a while, it does indeed convey that information. But that’s the problem – you have to study it for a while.

I’m also pretty sure if you’re technically savvy that you’ll find the information you need fairly quickly: “I have Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit, I want Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, therefore I need to do a custom install”.

But the majority of people are not that savvy. The best you can expect from them is that ‘they have Vista/XP and want Windows 7’. They don’t know if they are 32-bit or 64-bit, or how to find out which they are. They don’t want to work out which upgrade method to use, they just want to put a DVD in the drive and let the computer do the rest.

Sadly, you can’t even get all of the information you need directly from the chart, you also need to read the detailed information below it to be 100% sure that you are right. Microsoft, knowing that it has introduced some terms with which people won’t be immediately familiar, ‘custom install’ and ‘in-place upgrade’, also takes pains to explain what those mean. Also, the chart doesn’t show all of the versions of Windows 7, missing as it is the Starter edition. Don’t forget, this doesn’t even include the myriad server versions.

What I find fascinating about a piece of communications such as this is that it conveys a lot about how the company that generated it thinks. I say this, because I don’t feel we can blame Microsoft’s marketing people for how head-scratchingly complex this is. The chart is complex because the upgrade process is complex – indeed, given the number of possible permutations of Windows Vista and Windows 7, the chart is almost certainly as clear as it can be. Which is to say, as clear as mud.

I believe that the underlying problems here are:

• The product itself is too complex. There are too many versions of Windows – and this makes choice harder, not easier.
• It’s assumed that the consumer has a greater degree of technical knowledge, in the majority of cases, than is likely.

So, because the product is complex and comes in many versions, the upgrade process is inescapably a complex one. I’m sure that Microsoft feels that there are many good reasons for this, after all, different users need different things – but they often don’t know what they need until they are using the product, and feel short-changed if their version is missing something that others have.

Microsoft then compounds its errors by assuming a greater amount of knowledge than an average consumer will have. 32-bit? 64-bit? Who knows? On top of this, Microsoft introduces unfamiliar terms. Why rename ‘clean install’ to be ‘custom install’ when the former is more readily understood and requires no explanation? Microsoft knows it’s made a mistake here, because it then uses an entire paragraph to explain what it means.

The end result is a piece of marketing that – while it does convey the required information – communicates something else far more clearly: ‘our products are complex; upgrading is complex; we are hard to do business with’. In short, the chart is, for many people, a barrier to sales and not an aid.

The problem is that redesigning the chart won’t fix things. The issue is deeper rooted in Microsoft’s culture: a product-development process that churns out complexity rather than simplicity. Faced with a possible 66 different upgrade permutations, the chart designer really is on a hiding to nothing.

From a sales and marketing perspective, the ideal is to have one box: Windows 7. A product without the glass ceilings of Home Premium and Professional editions, just one box that contains the lot, to which you can upgrade from whatever you have. Then the chart isn’t needed at all: the product is simple, it’s easy to buy and it will work for me.

I’m sure a lot of time went into the development of Windows 7. It’s a shame that it didn’t result in a single DVD that everyone could use.

There’s no doubt that Microsoft learned a lot of lessons from Windows Vista and has reacted accordingly, and, as a product, Windows 7 is much improved. The same is not true of either its product marketing, which leads to far too many product versions requiring a complex explanation of upgrade paths, or its marketing communications, which essentially loses sight of just how little technical knowledge the average user may have.

Keep it simple: not just in the communications, but how a product is developed: fewer product options means clearer communications and easier, faster sales.

 

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