Last week the newest version of OpenOffice was announced, and the new release revived the discussion whether or not OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office. Although I don’t particularly like Microsoft and normally don’t care about office suites, this latest release did get me thinking.

Disclaimer

Before I start talking about what I think of OpenOffice, let me explain that I appreciate their attempts. OpenOffice has been great at enforcing the Open Document Format that is becoming more and more mainstream. I salute the people behind ODF that make sure that there will be a real standard (unlike OOXML) that will be usable by anyone who wants to make an office suite.

The Players

When you look at some of the current office suites being used, you can probably limit them to the following leaders:

• Google Docs
• Apple iWork ‘08
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org

Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice obviously try to play to the same crowd: office addicts. I am not trying to say anything bad about these users, but these people simply need their office suite because of their business, workflow, or other important external factors. Apple iWork and Google Docs on the other hand try to do something different. Call it a niche, call it innovation or call it the long tail, but in the end both of these products make sure they have something specific that makes them more interesting than the big two.

Google Docs

Google Docs has a clear advantage above all other products: collaboration. Because of the online nature of Google Docs they are the only suite of the four that makes collaboration extremely easy. Universities, companies, and even individuals all see the advantages of this. Google recently even proved that Google Docs is destined to coexist next to big suites, by providing OpenOffice in their Google Pack. Admittedly, Google Docs is not the most powerful suite, but unless you are an office addict, you really don’t need anything that powerful.

iWork ‘08

Apple iWork ‘08 on the other hand is making life easier for Apple fans. The suite doesn’t focus on business or students, but just people wanting to make something nice. Like most things Apple it is absolutely simple to use and attracts all kinds of people that aren’t in it for using the tool, but for making a product. Sadly there is nothing like iWork for Windows, but there is a clear niche for tools that enable simple creation of beautiful documents.

Microsoft Office

Clearly, Microsoft Office has a long history with business users. These users enjoy the full integration of Office with products like Outlook and Exchange, and the full range of possibilities the suite offers. OpenOffice is slowly gaining on Microsoft Office, especially in the public sector, but for most companies the economic reasons for a switch to OpenOffice might not be clear. Furthermore, although open standards are nice, not every company has the same to gain by adopting them.

So What About OpenOffice?

What’s OpenOffice’s niche? What sells them? Surely it is not things like ease of use or collaboration, as those are clearly better handled by Google Docs and Apple iWork. Will it sell because it is open source? Maybe governments and other IT companies might understand the importance of open source, but others mighty simply not care to change their workflow.

Then, is there a reason for OpenOffice to exist besides it being open source? Do we still need OpenOffice if ODF ever becomes an industry standard? I personally hope that OpenOffice will be here to stay, but it is clear that with the increase of interoperability, less and less people will be interested in big office suits. And as less people will need Microsoft Office, less people will also need OpenOffice.

Maybe, once we are done standardizing, it is time to leverage the power of open source to the point of innovation?

As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regent Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface.

Although the iPod Touch was the big announcement, it isn’t available yet in store. Still, the iPod Nano and iPod Classic (the new name for the old style iPod) have gotten a few updates that really make a difference, so we had a look at those. I didn’t bring my camera so I don’t have any photo’s, I hope to get some of the iPod Touch once it’s in store.

The iPod Nano got the biggest update as it is now comes in a way smaller form factor and is able to play video. Bringing video to the entire iPod lineup (except the shuffle) is important to Apple as well as many other players like Podcasters. When I tried the new iPod Nano, I noticed that the video playback is “just fine” as it can only be so much impressive on a 2″ screen. Yes, the resolution is sharp and the playback is smooth, but I rather watch stuff on my Macbook if I can.

The iPod Classic and iPod Nano both got a new interface update, giving them both Cover Flow and a new split screen interface for certain views. We noticed that the iPod Nano is much faster in starting up and powering down than its predecessor, but somehow sometimes felt a bit slow in navigating and especially when scrolling through a whole lot of photos. Reinier noted that scrolling through photos is much smoother on his iPod Nano 2G.

To see if this scrolling went any smoother on the new iPod Classic, I looked one up and had a play with it. It’s way faster in the menu’s and the photo viewing, and I would even enjoy watching a video on it. Still, I noticed some performance problems when playing a song and scrolling through the Cover Flow at high speed. Somehow doing these things caused the music to “skip” repeatedly, but strangely we couldn’t repeat this skipping later on when we tried some other iPod Classics. Is this posibly a hardware defect or does it have something to do with the song I played?

In the end we really liked the iPod Nano as it is cheap, very portable (may I say it is a Shuffle competitor in size?) and the new Product Red color is very nice and funky. The ability to play video’s on it might seem trivial but it opens the world of Podcasts to those people who want to have something interesting to watch on the road. I am actually thinking of getting one myself, although I still love my Shuffle.

Reinier and I were at the Apple Store Regent Street this afternoon, admiring the new iPod line (short review to come soon). Besides finding some new details about the iPods that aren’t visible in the adds, we also noticed something about Apple’s personal approach to offering support: the Genius Bar.

The Genius Bar is a bar-like counter in the middle of every Apple Store, where a Mac user can get help from a so called genius. The Genius Bar can help you with hardware problems (which I have had a lot) but also with software problems. Across the bar is another bar called the iPod Bar where iPod users can get help with their iPod. These bars are in the middle of the store, among people buying their new stuff that they hope to never have to bring to the bar.

In a traditional electronics store like Media World or PC World, these service desks tend to be hidden in some kind of hidden part of the store, tucked away to hide angry customers from the new customers that are about to buy their new products. In some cases (like in the Media World in Arnhem, NL) this service desk even has its own entrance to avoid any new customer from ever seeingwhat goes on in the service area.

Clearly, stores like PC World have a good reason to make sure that you, the new customer, don’t notice that there are 10 people in the service area with the crappy product that you just wanted to buy. Imagine buying an HP laptop while you see 4 people in line at the support counter with the same laptop! Amazingly stores like PC World will even charge you £29 for installing your Windows again, while a MacBook can be reset in the Apple Store for free (within warranty).

Customer Support - Also Relevant to Experience Design

Apple’s decision to make their support desk so extremely present in the Apple Store doesn’t just show that they have major guts, it also shows that Apple considers support to be part of the product you buy and therefore part of their experience. When you buy an Apple you get support, it is there in the store, it is something that you can rely on. When you buy a PC or any other hardware, you just get the option of support. When you want support, you will first have to ask for it, as it won’t always just be there for you.

Obviously this comes with consequences as Apple will really want to avoid any really pissed of customers. I think that this is why Apple recently fixed my Macbook 1 month after warranty, simply because it was reasonable. Now, this it is probably also the reason that they gave those early iPhone adopters a $100 Apple Store credit. The end result is that Apple soon will have a lot of happy users in the store, that just had some excellent service as they got another $100 to buy a new experience. What is a better image to create to your other new customers?

In the end it is not that hard to do what Apple does, and I would hope that others would follow. To summarize what Apple does I hope to inspire some local companies to give the same experience here is a list of simple things you can do:

1. Make the service desk a nice place to be.
2. Make it present in the store.
3. Get some nice and honest “Geniuses”.
4. Be reasonable.
5. Give your “Geniuses” the power to decide what is reasonable.
6. Take responsibility for what you sell. (See this article for more elaboration)
7. Make customers that need support leave the store with a smile.

A while back I wrote that Apple should do something similar to the announced Palm Foleo. Although the thought of a Foleo-like device by Apple might have sounded like a good plan, a Palm Foleo seems to have had less than a warm welcome. So, today Palm announced that the Foleo is dead, mainly because they actually felt it would be better to focus on their battle with actual cool products like the iPhone and those HTC phones. All and all it will probably be a better plan anyway.

Bye bye Foleo, we will miss you.

A week ago I noticed zapreader.com, a site that makes it relatively easy to teach yourself speedreading. At least 1000 people also bookmarked it and from personal experience I can say: It really works quite well. In a nutshell, it takes a bunch of text and splits it into words. It then displays each word (or a block of two, which works a bit better in my opinion) in a huge font in the middle of your screen, for a fraction of a second, before moving on to the next word.

However, the ZAP reader itself has some annoyances so I decided to fix them.

Thus, I present: the (mac only!) desktop app version of zap reader. Download here: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMac.dmg.

It works very simply: select text in any application, then hit CMD+SHIFT+V and ZAPMac automatically starts and zapreads the selected text for you. Once the text is done, it quits automatically. Use Z and X to rewind/fast forward 16 words at a time, and use A and Q to speed up or slow down. space starts and stops, and there are preferences to change a number of things, though the defaults worked the best for me. It intentionally goes fullscreen - to make sure there is no distraction for your eyes.

Apparently it works so well because of two things:

• It saves you from having to ‘track’ - you no longer expend effort to keep your eyes in the right place. Your eyes no longer need to move at all, just keep staring at the same place.
• It makes use of ‘brain replay’. Ever said ‘What did you say?” to someone, only to realize that you DID hear them after all? Your brain has a limited ‘pipeline’ of sorts, but you usually incorrectly think you misheard or misread forcing you to take action. When reading, this means you often reread sentences that you don’t need to reread. With ZAP Reader you force yourself into going forward.

This is my first foray into Mac Os X Cocoa development, incidentally. I spent maybe 12 hours on getting this thing together, including learning a new programming language from scratch (well, enough to write this, anyhow), and including learning how to distribute it, set it up with a nice preference pane that stores its settings in the right places, and all that jazz. Basically cocoa development is really nice and very simple, which may explain why Mac software looks so good.

If you’re interesting in the source, here you go: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMacSource.zip.

This is a story about how to react when your customers contact you because your product isn’t quite up to the quality you’ve promised. Quality, or rather the expectation of quality, is a funny thing. Seth Godin explains it best: Underpromise, Overdeliver. This principle extends very well to ‘customer support’ - it’s a great opportunity to overdeliver.

The thing is, as a rule people expect bad treatment and hardly any solutions when they call technical support. This is great; the ‘underpromise’ aspect is already taken care of. Thus, the only thing you need to do is overdeliver: Blow people away with generosity and helpfulness. If you run a web startup, allow people to contact you. Yes, this costs money, but it’s a great opportunity to generate viral marketing. A pleasant experience with technical support is great smalltalk, after all.

The paradox is: If you expect a certain experience, and you get it, that’s great, but that’s where the story ends. On the other hand, if you need to place a few calls to tech support, but those calls get you back to the experience you expected without hassle, you end up with the same result - except it took you more time. Sounds like a worse deal compared to getting something that just works, but paradoxically the tech support experience actually strengthens your emotional binding to the product, and makes you talk about it a lot more.

A real evil genius would ship products that are broken and have excellent tech support!

To make that a bit more tangible, here’s a personal story about my runin with Apple technical support. Mostly, apple got it wrong.

I bought a macbook within a month of their original release, about a year ago. Unfortunately, it was riddled with annoying problems which all surfaced in the months to come. From broken harddrives to two separate ‘random shutdown’ incidents, to broken optical drives, and more. After 8 separate repair incidents in a period of 10 months, I lost faith in the unit entirely.

Hence, I decided to write a letter to ask for a new one, or at least a free extension on the warranty.

This sparked off a long long rollercoaster ride.

At first I received a phonecall which virtually guaranteed a new macbook. After hearing nothing new for a while, I phoned them up again, to hear that I wouldn’t receive a new one, nor would the warranty be extended; I’d just have to buy applecare same as everyone else.

A day later, I received another phonecall apologizing and offering me a replacement macbook, again.

At some point I was instructed to hand over the unit at the door to a courier, and I’d receive a new macbook 4 days later.

That process ended up taking a full month as there were no more macbooks to give. I had to figure this out myself when Think Secret reported on an update to the macbook line. (When a line gets updated at apple, usually stock has run out well before the update, but news of the update is secret until a day or two before. Then after the update, there’s a shortage).

I went through a similar promise/retraction/apology/shipping problems cycle in regards to getting the 2GB I accidentally left in the unit I shipped to apple back, but I’ll spare you the details.

I got a new macbook out of the ordeal and I’m grateful. The new notebook hasn’t broken down yet, and it works great. Yet, the customer experience in getting it replaced wasn’t an experience I’ll be converting people into apple afficionados with in the future; it wasn’t all that great. They didn’t overdeliver; they barely delivered.

Contrast to how this sort of thing should have been done:

A long time ago my external Maxtor harddrive failed. I could still read bits and pieces of the data, but it was making very scary noises and the disk timed out frequently. Maxtor offered me a choice: Either send back the defective unit now, and they’d send me a replacement when it arrived at the service center, or, give them my credit card details, and they’d ship a replacement unit immediately, allowing me to get as much data as I could onto the new drive. The caveat: If I didn’t send the old unit back within 2 weeks after receiving the new one, they’d bill my credit card for the full cost of the new unit. That’s a great solution and I gladly took it.

Apple doesn’t offer this choice. For a company that is notoriously secretive about releasing updates, that’s a big mistake. In this case, the apple rep told me that the unit would ‘likely ship within a day or two’ for an entire month, probably because the service rep wasn’t in the loop about the model update either.

More examples of positive tech support experiences over at the getSatisfaction blog.

A couple of months ago I did a small review of what I thought would be the really interesting features of Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Not only were all my predictions about the user interface and the growing up of certain features true (yes, drop the balloons!), but Apple also introduced some new features including a new dock and menu and stacks. Obviously I wanted to test this (nearly) feature-full product so I managed to get my hands on the WWDC2007 build and gave it a try.

After an afternoon of playing with Leopard, I was amazed about how well this beta release works. Here and there I encountered some bugs (especially in Photo Booth which has a bunch of new effects that just crash the app) but overall everything was simply quick. Might I say it was maybe even quicker than my Tiger install? Especially the Spotlight search has really been improved to offer more of a feel that Quicksilver does at the moment for Tiger. Furthermore the new look, with harder contrasts between active and inactive windows, is just so much cleaner and with the help of Quick Look and Cover Flow the finder has just become so much more useful.

Finally I was really amazed about how they improved some of my personal Mac Whines. First of all they changed the little network menu item. It now auto-refreshes and shows the difference between open and closed networks. Another network related improvement is the automatic discovery of shares on the network, allowing you to browse open shares much like you would do on Windows. In other words: no need to explicitly mount folders, and no crashing finder when you switch network with a folder mounted.

All an all I think Leopard is worth the money as it offers a lot of improvements over Tiger. I didn’t even mention Time Machine, Spaces and all the other new features, but I think it is those small things that make you a happy Mac user.

There has been a lot of talk since Apple released their iTunes Plus service. Besides being DRM-free, the files were also marked with some personal details of the user. Even some Dutch blogs started talking about how Apple created a new kind of DRM for their DRM-free content. I got in a nice discussion with the writer of this article and I would like to make some things clear here:

1. The “disturbing” information has always been in files you buy on iTunes. Therefore I believe it is not valid to demand the removal of this information from the plus version of the file and not the normal one as that would be putting the rights of one customer before the other.
2. The info is not DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is used to manage your rights, others and anyone have who might want to use the file. The info is not used for any management and is therefore more of a watermark. Watermarks are not DRM, end of story.
3. As #2 states it is not DRM, it is again not valid to demand the removal of this info from the plus version and not the DRM version. Buying DRM free music does not grant you more privacy than others, that is just stupid.

Don’t misunderstand me, I have to agree that including this info in the files is silly as it is easy to manipulate and just stupid. Furthermore it is a bit misleading of Apple to not make it clear to everyone that this info is in the files.

No, I won’t get an iPhone for my birthday (unless you want to donate/tip me some money?) but today Apple announced the release date of the iPhone: June 29th. Besides being one of the first days of the summer, it is also my birthday! Yay me! This will be a very interesting birthday!

See the ads on the Apple website.

Palm announced a new device today with the name Foleo and I think it might be one of the first good things Palm has created in years. It is a “small mobile companion”, that targets user with the need for more in a phone and less in a laptop. The device reminds me of something I have been thinking about recently, as I was thinking of what next device Apple had to make for me.

Ever since I switched from a Windows desktop to a Mac laptop, I have been thinking of how this changed my lifestyle. I used to have a PC at home, and when I traveled around I actually used to use other people’s PC to remote desktop to my own PC at home. Although easy, this method depended on my internet connection at home and the internet/workstation availability at the location I traveled to. I love the fact that I now have a laptop with me at all time that has my data (recently upgraded to 160GB) and settings. But I think there is a market for a different device.

And this is where the Palm Foleo comes in. The Foleo offers a real companion to you mobile phone, and has a nice 10.2 inch screen and a full size keyboard. The targeted market for this device is clearly people who really want to send emails and browse, but don’t like telephone interfaces. I admit, even with my N95 I only use the Wi-Fi to search for hotspots, and once located I get my MacBook out of my bag. With the amount of people carrying around fat mobiles with horrible interfaces, and others carrying around heavy laptops in order to access their email, I started thinking of a product that would be far easier.

Imagine that Apple would make a device like the Folio in the form of a “MacBook Mini”, allowing you to easily access your data on your iPhone and syncing at home with your nice iMac. I think a Folio-like device would do for on the road as I never need a dvd/cd drive, could really do with a solid state hard drive, and would really not mind a smaller screen. There are some hints that Apple is going in the direction of an even smaller MacBook, as many PowerBook 12″ users haven’t switched yet because they are missing an ultra-portable model.

I hope that Apple understands the trend of our society and uses its powerful experience in syncing to make the world a better place.