SkyDrive need to compete with both Dropbox and Google Drive.
Basic feature wise, these three services are pretty equivalent.
The one more ubiquitous and more used by third party apps are going to win.
SkyDrive has to have:
Evernote is everywhere. In all possible platforms.
OneNote is very useful product and yet the best of the OneNote 2013 is not available in Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. Also there is no SkyDrive API that allows users to post things to OneNote. Think of number of Chrome Extensions that could be made!
Note applications are going to get more useful as it gets more ubiquitous.
Windows programs have their settings all over the place.
On the contrary, almost all Mac apps follow the convention of
and a common shortcut of Command + ,
This allows users to learn how to get to a preference once and use it on every app. That’s good UX.
As a platform vendor, creating and promoting a good paradigm and default way of doing things is important.
Desktop is not going away. Office still uses it. Photoshop still uses it. Video editing still uses it. 3D graphics still uses it. Serious work happens in Desktop. Microsoft needs to improve and the desktop design language as well. Zune was the start, Office 2013 has similar new design language. Windows 8 has bits and piece of a new design language.
There is room for improvement and it won’t be wildly adopted unless Microsoft shows the best example themselves.
Desktop is fundamentally different than Metro. More tasks should can be done faster with keyboard shortcuts than gestures can ever accomplish. It is awesome to have smaller hitting targets with a mouse pointer because you can fit more functionality.
Microsoft has some great way to manage multiple panes of user interface. Take a look at Visual Studio and the way you can dock any user interface pane into any pane with tabs. It’s pretty awesome.
Make more of Office 2013’s user interface parts as a system wide UI widgets. Make it easier to make better UI. Make more designers make Windows UI mocks than OS X ones. Make the world drool over how pretty Windows apps are.
Metro is a whole different area to improve. They need more work. But don’t lose sight of what’s important. Desktop is not going away.
It’s the web world. People expect innovation faster. There is a new iPhone every year and new iOS and OS X every year. Android is updated like every month.
Microsoft need to push faster updates to people. Starting with the web services. When is the calendar going to be updated on outlook.com?
There is no need to follow OS X convention exactly but Windows 8.1 should come out 3 months after Windows 8 to fix the largest user complaints or things that were not possible to build before the ship date. Windows Phone 8.1 should have came out 3 months after and included a notification center before BlackBerry 10 came out.
Microsoft is capable of great innovation but they are not going to win unless they can keep up the pace with all the competitors with faster update cycle.
They need to be on the web-update cycle. Weekly and monthly. Make the beta versions available to users. Allow users to be on faster-update cycle. No need to put enterprise users to the risky update cycle. Only push security patches to them, for the users, push updates and notifications in all fronts.
Also one area that desperately needs faster update is IE. Firefox, Chrome are automatically updated and their release cycle is monthly. They both also have a beta channel which is more up to date with the source code but less stable. They both also has a nightly builds that is cutting edge
IE needs to prove that their best is better than other’s best.
IE is becoming great and IE 10 is certainly better than IE9 which is certainly a capable browser. They just have to update much more frequently and be available to Windows 7 and 8 faster.
Consumers understand beta. Journalists understand beta. They can tolerate a little bug here and there as long as there is an understanding that the next release will fix those bugs.
Make IE beta or IE nightly immediately. Show even better benchmark than Firefox and Chrome. It doesn’t have to be stable.
Metro Apps are great. But Microsoft recognizes why desktop is important. That’s why Windows RT and Windows 8 includes the desktop and support for traditional apps. Sort of.
It’s really confusing for consumers to understand why traditional desktop apps won’t be compatible on a Windows RT. It has a desktop, so why wouldn’t it run? It should.
Even if it is slow.
Windows RT desperately needs compatibility with x86 apps. If you want to unarchive things with 7-zip, you can’t. If you want to Torrent, you can’t. If you want a better notepad, you can’t. If you want to run putty.exe to connect to a remote machine, you can’t. All of these apps sounds like a small apps that should be able to run even on an ARM device.
As matter of fact, a Jailbroken Windows RT can run a recompiled version of those apps perfectly fine.
To remedy this situation, Microsoft should
As a user I should be able to login with my Microsoft Account and quickly re-install all the free desktop apps including Skype, Notepad++, Putty, 7-Zip, Torrent, etc, on a brand new machine
Mobile messaging is replacing instant messaging market and making it’s to kill sms market. iMessage is not only a mobile messaging platform but is becoming general instant messaging because it’s available in OS X and iOS (iPod Touch and iPad)
There is a big market for this. Whats app is doing great, Facebook Messenger is great too. It’s not enough to build Facebook chat integration in Messages in Windows and Windows Phone. They need a email & phone number based messaging system. As a user I should be able to
Microsoft already has a huge messaging platform, Skype but the integration isn’t there yet.
It should come preinstalled and should not require app to be installed or running. It should be as seamless as a normal texting app as long as you are logged in with Microsoft Account. This way, a Skype call can be done to any Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox (with new Kinect 2)
outlook.com has great new user interface along with skydrive and yet the calendar part of the web service suite is still outdated live.com UX.
Microsoft should build new calendar service that is more awesome than google’s counter part by
Current Me tile and People app integration sucks.
